I always thought my mom was weird.  She didn’t like Halloween.  We didn’t really get to do things up big for Halloween…but even my mom knew that a certain level of Halloween-y festivity was required.    I loved Halloween.  I never got candy as a kid, but on Halloween there was so much candy flying around that some of it made it through the chinks in the healthy armor my mom kept locked in place around us.  My over-active imagination felt starved year around in the sea of staunchly stoic and placid Nordic Lutheran practicality in which I was stranded…but on Halloween, even the most pedestrian mentalities seemed to loosen up.  Even more, the dark, scary unseen things that we secretly feared walked openly and sometimes arrayed themselves in extravagant detail…and revealed themselves as by turns beautiful, cute, funny, and even slightly ridiculous.

     When we lived in North St. Paul, we dressed up Adventure Boy in his little costumes, and took to the crowded streets, trying desperately to figure out which of the teeming masses were which of our friends and neighbors.

     We’d exclaim over the cuteness of the children, their ability to act out the characters and look the parts, oooh and ahhh over the workmanship and detail or creativity of home-made costumes…

     I seem to remember Halloween as a time when the rules were reversed, and kids got to enjoy the experience of just once a year, living in a world of magic, danger, and being able to engage in extortion while pretending to be someone completely different from ourselves, and surfing a seemingly unending sugar high.  We understood it was just one night.  We knew we had to eat our vegetables and clean our plates, and say “please and thank you”, and not ask for anything that we might want because it’s rude the other 364 days out of the year.

     But that one night we got a nod and a wink and even chuckles and pats on the head while the rules went out the window.  We understood that this was one night when just about anything could happen, and the rest of the community (ie, those cranky adults who grumbled and bitched about us all the rest of the year) made it happen for us.

     I don’t know about the rest of you…but it was a special time for me, and one that my life would have been infinitely poorer without.  It connected me to my community the way civics lessons and scout meetings and church-youth-group public service projects never could.

     It was the connection of conspiracy.  Of sharing a secret.  It was the connection of the wink and the nudge, and the knowledge that everyone was being just a little bit naughty, and since we were all in it together, nobody was going to get in trouble for it.  It made for a community as thick as thieves.

     As an adult, it was the experience of being out and about at the same time as everyone else, having everyone in the neighborhood come past your door in the course of one night, being able to spoil other people’s kids, and them not saying anything against it.  Of being able to be the fun, indulgent grown-up…a feeling of giving back what had been given to you.

     Last night, we had five trick-or-treaters.  I knew one of them.  Rocky took the kids out and met a few people he knew from the neighborhood, but for the most part, it was an empty Halloween.

     Today when I dropped Grasshopper off at the bus, I asked the neighbor lady how her Halloween was.

     She said “Quiet.  We don’t celebrate Halloween.”

     Now, she’s a nice lady, and a good neighbor, but something in the way she said it told me that the Halloweens of times past are gone, and she’s just as happy to see them die.

     We don’t like to allow any room for the things we know we “shouldn’t” do.  We don’t like to ever let on that there is a time for children to misbehave or be indulged.  Our society is wound so tight that there is no place for a day where the whole society stops and for just a little bit, enjoys breaking the rules and sanctions loosening its discipline.  There’s no will to give a wink and a nod at our dark side…the part of us that would like to just go and extort what we want from those around us and eat whatever body-destroying treats we want to.  It has even become unfashionable to acknowledge, mock, imitate and laugh at our own deep, Jungian fears.

     Not only do I think that’s a little sad, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s not entirely healthy.