I can’t get very nostalgic about Halloween (or Candyfest) because all it ever meant in small-town Texas was the night that more of us urchins than usual were out up to no good. (We ran wild most of the time anyway, but it was the night there were the most of us…making it harder for the poor residents — & parents — to figure out who to blame for what.)
Here, the holiday is celebrated as Undas — a night & following day of actually visiting the dead (instead, I suppose, the other way around). People flock to the cemeteries (of which there are startlingly few in a city of 10 million — so that “graves” are actually concrete crypts built 8–10 slots high) commonly to clean up (squatters make there homes there the rest of the year, so they get a free once-a-year housekeeping crew), bring picnic lunches & make little offerings of the deceased vice-of-choice (tobacco, booze, coffee w/ 4 scoops of sugar, &c…) to — well, I don’t really know the reasoning — perhaps to just lighten things up a bit — or to ensure there’ll be plenty extra for the busy grave/tomb cleaners. (The deceased themselves being beyond much further consumption.)
But what really got my attention was the animated goblins. We don’t do much in the way of goblins here because they’re so commonplace — a couple of blocks from my house is Balate Drive, home of the famous White Lady (reference to her flimsy, billowing robes, not her race) who is so well known as to merit yet another meritless movie every 3–5yrs. If you talk to 10 people from around my neighborhood, at least one of them will have seen her themselves — or swear they know someone who did. (The Balete tree, AKA, strangler fig, is a Grand Central Station of Filipino supernatural activity.
Oh yeah — the animated goblins — well, it’s late for me…the sun’s already up, so there’s no time to tell you of the Christmas animatronics at the former ice cream factory next door — a regular holiday feature that the man who built this house used to help create — or the movie crew people who, after the demise of the neighborhood’s 2 major movie studios, applied their energies to the creation of elaborately lighted displays that (again thanks to the “primitive engineering talents” of my house’s builder) are still hauled out by a few long-term residents. If that sounds confusing, it’s probably because Christmas does actually start in September here — US consumer Halloween only having made inroads in the years since I’ve lived here — &, of course, the people, identifying more w/ Indians than Pilgrims, have somehow never warmed up to “Thanksgiving” at all…so I’ll come back to that closer to Christmas, ha?
