Stop Spreading Halloween So Thin

It’s time we quit letting October become all of fall.

Jack Grimes
Sep 4, 2018 · 7 min read

Listen, I’m a rational person. I enjoy a good holiday about as often as we have them (there’s something of a dry spell over the summer, but that’s fine). I gladly partake in an annual turkey dinner, or prank, or green-clad parade. I’ve been known to enjoy a yearly arborage, or labor, or even memorializing. Holidays are good! They make good benchmarks, pinning our perception of time up to the real thing lest it slip away and become one undifferentiated stream of unholy days. They let you know what time of year it is, and when to start and stop certain seasonal activities (grilling is acceptable between Memorial and Labor, pumpkin-flavored drinks between Labor and Thanksgiving). This piece isn’t a case against holidays, or celebration. It’s a case against something I’ve noticed for years, something it’s time for everyone to come together and stop:

Why does Halloween start in August now?

Part of the problem, as always, is the endless brunt of capitalism squeezing time and money out of us as hard as it can. Foam pumpkins, plastic skeletons, and bags of fake cobwebs start cropping up in our nation’s Dollar Trees and Michaelses as early as late summer, by now competing with back-to-school items for shelf space. This is a problem we also see with Christmas, the glistening fruit of the fiscal year stretched out to encompass nearly a fourth of the calendar. And I don’t love that, either. But I’ll write about that when it’s time for it.

As a child, Halloween is easily a top-three or even #1 favorite holiday. You get to walk around your hometown at night (often exhilarating) with a group of friends, and on top of that, every house on the street is dispensing candy just for ringing a doorbell. For one glorious fall night, your neighborhood is a long row of gachapons, their jack-o-lantern’d front porches hiding mounds of fun-sized Milky Ways and those weird Tootsie Rolls that were other flavors. It’s a magical experience for a kid- the crisp, dry air abuzz with excitement as you figured out how to fasten the seatbelt in the back of your mom’s Saturn without damaging your delicately-crafted (or store-bought and just bulky) costume, driving into the sunset and stumbling out onto the damp grass and then warm sidewalk, head spinning, learning to anticipate a lunge from an older kid with a gory getup or an animatronic decoration, its tinny cackling only sharpening your resolve to hit every street in town and fill that plastic pumpkin to the brim, no matter how many boxes of raisins it means tossing down storm drains.

In older years, that childish wonder is supplanted by more malicious ideas — Halloween is a magical night when you and several friends pile into the back of someone’s pickup truck with a couple cartons of eggs and a big pack of the cheapest toilet paper on the market and go trash the principal’s house, or a mean teacher, or anyone who happens to have a tempting-looking cupola or large front-yard tree. Halloween becomes a night all about rebellion, of lashing out at authority, what little breath you can manage to force through the mouth-slot in a rubber Mike Myers mask baited with giddiness.

Or you cling to the purist interpretation for as long as you can, either “looking after” younger siblings as an excuse to get in on the trick-or-treating or accompanying some buds to a local haunted attraction, to be chased around through artificial fog by what you have to assume is a full-grown adult in special-effects makeup, or funneled through a “haunted house” one cluster at a time and barraged with strobe lights and loud excerpts from a Bone-Chilling Sound Effects Volume IV CD.

Halloween is good, is what I’m getting at.

College drapes a homogenizing veil over pretty much all the big holidays- their diverse nuances lost to a demographic desperate for any reason to go hammer some Smirnoff Ice at a stranger’s house. This doesn’t drain Halloween of its joy — Maybe someone plays Thriller two or three times back-to-back, and maybe all the girls have black leggings and eyeliner whiskers on. Maybe someone put a lot of time into their costume and is roaming around raking in approval. Even in this harsh, cynical, “adult” take on Halloween, there are cracks where that childish joy seeps in.

In real adulthood, I assume, the cycle completes itself, at least for those fortunate enough to establish some home equity. Now you get to hit Walgreens on the afternoon of the 30th and fill a big plastic punchbowl with whatever’s left on the shelf, disseminating that same primal excitement you remember from Halloweens past to the new generation. Those fond of fear (giving and receiving) might build an attraction in their backyard staffed by neighborhood teens, or pose as a lifeless scarecrow in a rocking chair to score a few cheap jumps from wary adolescents.

Halloween is good, is what I’m getting at. There’s a wide range of things that make it enjoyable, and because of that it’s enjoyable to a wide range of people. Maybe horror movies make me deeply and unenjoyably upset, and maybe I don’t function that well in a “party” environment. Maybe I have a slight allergy to fog-machine stuff that impairs my breathing after a few hours. Maybe my body can only handle a small handful of candy corn every year. But I definitely enjoy the methodical craft of carving a pumpkin, or the artisinal process of making a caramel apple. I can see the appeal of decorating with all those foam gourds and fake spiderwebs.

Let’s get some non-spooky, regular autumn in there first.

The problem I’m trying to describe here stems, I believe, from our culture’s increasing need for immediate gratification. Like all holidays, Halloween deserves at most to be celebrated throughout its host month- October 1st until the 31st should be its outermost boundaries. Let’s get some non-spooky, regular autumn in there first, for people who enjoy a more general fall thing without all the gothic trappings. I know it’s tempting after a holidayless stretch you’ve been stuck in since Independence Day to reach as far as you can for the next thing and start hanging chains and shopping for clown makeup in September, but try waiting. It’ll enrich your Halloween experience to know that it’s limited and therefore precious, Dollar Tree be damned.

This article isn’t a jab at the “Halloween year-round” folks, as bizarre as I may find them. Having a personal brand closely conflated with witches and ghouls and black and orange is fine, I guess — we all present ourselves in unique ways, and all of them are valid.

I’d be ridiculed for saying it was Easter in February, or the Fourth of July in May, even if I accessorize my person with eggs and jelly beans or flags and hot dogs all year.

But jumping the proverbial gun on Halloween when it’s still 80 degrees outside and the leaves are green feels like an uncomfortable juxtaposition. You might say it’s Halloween, but the Earth’s axis doesn’t agree. Halloween is part of fall, and you can’t drag it outside of that with any seriousness — if I’m still wearing shorts seven days a week then it’s not fall and therefore can’t be Halloween. I’d be ridiculed for saying it was Easter in February, or the Fourth of July in May, even if I accessorize my person with eggs and jelly beans or flags and hot dogs all year. What makes Halloween an outlier?

Maybe it’s because it asks that we shed the burden of social pretense and confront our fears and anxieties as if they really were so many plastic skeletons or teenagers in gory masks. People must like that relief. It’s possible that for many, Halloween is a psychologically cleansing experience, a yearly simplification of the messages of how to feel all around us. Instead of laying on our emotional plates the enigma of love or the strange combination of overeating and colonialism, Halloween consists of only the most primal emotion — Fear. Even in a time when our society, our news, our politics and our education system is predicated on fear, scraping all that cultural cruft away and pouring the core feeling into fake blood and metal clanging noises and viewings of Saw is probably a welcome deconstruction.

Personally, a lot of this enjoyment misses me. I appreciate Halloween as much as I appreciate any holiday, which means I have about two weeks worth of excitement in the tank every year. If I save it, like we all should, until October itself, then I’m bombarded for a month beforehand by people vastly more enthusiastic than me (universally unpleasant), and if I try to stay on the gunjumpers’ level from week one then I’m already sick of spooks and scares by the time the big day rolls around, and I feel like I’m stuck sidelining.

I appreciate Halloween as much as I appreciate any holiday, which means I have about two weeks worth of excitement in the tank every year.

Maybe it’s me who’s in the wrong- Halloween is now a season, and I’m the Scrooge of it, clutching my unscary fall accoutrements well after it’s appropriate. Maybe we should, as a blanket of cartoonish fear to keep out the real kind, be planting styrofoam tombstones in our yards and sitting motion activated angry clowns on our porches 365 days a year.

What I’m saying here, from my position, is that you might find it worth it to wait. Hold off a little longer before you make that Michael’s trip — until October itself, if you can bear it. Find within yourself the strength to scroll past Beetlejuice and stream something else until it’s time, and you can unleash all that pent-up spooky excitement with that much more intensity. Being really, really into Halloween is acceptable when Halloween is actually happening. Just hang on through August and September, keep the cobwebs in storage another few weeks, until you can really share in the Halloween zeitgeist with people already offering all the enthusiasm they’ve got.

Jack Grimes

Written by

Podcaster, designer, artist, socialist. Using this platform for musings on media and weird microfiction.

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