Halloweening

What makes Halloween night special?

It’s our second Halloween in our house—before that we lived in a condo and an apartment building—and before that I grew up on a large lot and we’d go into town to trick or treat. So this is the first time I’ve lived somewhere where my street is a place to go trick or treating.

It’s a delightful thing to set up a little low-budget display to show that your house is open for business (a decorative gourd and a flameless candle), flick the porch lights on, prop the storm door, and see who shows up. Last year we got the alien-abduction costume: a parent is the alien, holding the child in their arms. This year we got the giant dinosaur whose head ended up inside our house. This stuff has gotten more involved than when I was a kid, let alone the days when you cut eye holes in an old sheet and called it a day. Then again, our treats were sophisticated too: Choco-Pies and Pocky sticks from H-Mart. And most of the kids know what those are, too. (In addition to the treats, our little black cat made a couple of appearances!)

It’s kind of a liminal feeling to interact with kids who are a bit too old to possibly be ours, but to very much be kids—it reminds you that you’re not a kid anymore, but also makes you feel young. It’s a strange thing, and I have a long essay kind of about this planned for the week before Christmas, but if you’re our age and don’t have kids yet, you can really almost forget that kids exist. And you can almost forget the kind of whimsy that kids are able to enjoy. That’s one of those tensions in homeownership I noticed even back when I was a kid—you have this amazing house and your own little piece of land, yet it takes so much effort to find the time to fully enjoy it.

After the stream of trick or treaters died down, we went for a walk around the neighborhood. Past the big lawn display house, then the light-show house, where we met the owners and chatted and even had a little adult treat.

There were so many people out; families, groups of kids and teens, people walking dogs or taking their regular strolls amid the extra crowds. People were standing and chatting, sitting on the usually empty benches, even a few kids sitting on the sidewalk in front of the elementary school. Unlike almost all the time, you could actually hear voices in the air from walking groups and backyard gatherings.

As we took our stroll, I was thinking about how strange it is that this one night a year, our staid neighborhood felt like an actual place; like a street in a city or town. We treated the perfunctory public realm like an actual shared space. Any sense that it would be slightly weird to walk or linger or sit down evaporates. We were friendlier than usual. You could think, on a regular day, that nobody actually lived in all these houses. On Halloween you knew they did.

In other words, Halloween is one of the ways American suburbanites allow themselves the joys of urbanism. Like a street festival in an old town where the streets are closed. We don’t realize that the joys of these celebrations are tied to the built environment and how we use it. By reserving it for special occasions, we obscure to ourselves not only what is possible, but what we’re actually experiencing.