Trick or Treat?

As autumn beckons the earth into colorful preparation for slumber, the winds that shake the leaves from the trees each year also deliver to my door a rather unwelcome guest: Halloween. What drives my antipathy towards such an ancient and widely-celebrated holiday? My wife Jessica was diagnosed with breast cancer on Halloween Day in 1997, so my displeasure seems to begin with the date itself and the dubious anniversary it represents. In the indefatigable optimism characteristic of many survivors, she now chooses to appreciate each Halloween as a reminder that she is still here, while I continue to regard the holiday with wariness and distrust.

Halloween also seems to have become the unofficial starting gun for the holiday marketing season, so even if I discount any personal signs or omens surrounding the date, I still find growing offense in the rampant commercialization that plagues this day along with our other national holidays. Far from being an exception in this regard, Halloween has steadily moved into the vanguard. According to an annual survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans are expected to spend 7.4 billion dollars on Halloween in 2014, making it among the top holidays in terms of consumer spending. I’m not suggesting that we abandon all novelty and adornment, but do yard-sized inflatable ghosts, suspended witches that fly in endless mechanical circles, and canned spooky sounds activated by breaking light beams on porches and walkways really deepen or enhance our enjoyment of the occasion? The spending report seems to make an emphatic case that they do, but to me it all feels like a triumph of consumerism over significance – the selling of our culture’s ceremonial observances – and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a point where the soul of the exercise gets lost in the accoutrement.

Of the overall expected spending on Halloween, nearly a third ($2.2 billion) is projected to be spent on candy alone. As a Type II diabetic, I have some predictable difficulty getting behind a holiday that seems so intensely centered on sugar. Halloween in isolation isn’t to blame for the current epidemic of childhood obesity in the US, but neither can it be found guiltless. The latest Center for Disease Control report on the topic indicates that nearly 1 in 5 US children and adolescents aged 2-19 years are obese, and obesity prevalence among children and adolescents has almost tripled since 1980. If left unchecked, a lifetime of health issues – diabetes not the least of them – likely awaits, so I question the wisdom of sugar occupying such a prominent role in this celebration. Again, I’m not proposing any particular legislative solution – I’ve simply grown increasingly critical of how I choose to participate in this holiday. In a wicked irony, my enormous sweet tooth and predilection for chocolate in particular complicate the matter. The abundance of confections brought in by coworkers and lining the supermarket shelves this time of year presents a near-irresistible enticement, so perhaps this aspect of my conflict is rooted as much in a personal struggle with temptation as in concern over a generalized health hazard.

The question of a viable alternative to handing out candy to trick-or-treaters is a difficult one. Many of my contemporaries remember carrying around small orange containers to collect spare change for UNICEF rather than gathering treats, but that seems a tougher sell in today’s more self-centered world. As children ourselves, we held out the veiled threat of a “trick” if the offering was not to our liking, and I think we retain some of this wariness as adults – no one wants to risk having eggs thrown at their car or having their trees draped in toilet paper as a consequence of being the only house on the block handing out raisins or pennies to costumed adolescents.

Ah, the costumes. Although in the fading photographs my early childhood Halloween costumes seem to rotate through a rather conventional assemblage of clowns, ghosts and superheroes, I still remember the excitement of the annual trip to the department store to pick them out. Perhaps out of a typically rebellious and boundary-testing attitude, my teenage costumes took a turn for the grisly as I progressed to vampires, zombies, and headless ghouls. While my inclination and enthusiasm for costumes declined somewhat over time, for years I continued to be a devout fan of haunted houses and horror movies.

Today, costumes have all but lost their appeal – conceivably because at this point in my life I am more in search of the genuine than the masked and the illusory. While I do believe there remains a positive and healthy element of fantasy and imagination in the choice and construction of today’s costumes, in stark contrast to my teenage years I have grown disenchanted with the more sinister and graphic ones. While I can attribute some of this to normal philosophical shifts that accompany aging and my perhaps naïve uneasiness with what I perceive is a general coarsening of our society (especially the desensitization to violence), it seems like I can also trace the partial origins of this distaste back to my wife’s cancer experience. There is no question that this brush with mortality caused me to take a cautious and protective step back from certain aspects of my life, as in my decision to stop riding motorcycles. But in addition to making more conscious and considered choices about how I spent my time and money, I also began to pay attention to the energy associated with various activities. I became more aware of the influence and impact of these activities on my well-being – not in any mystical, aura-reading way, but in a very visceral and basic “does this make me feel better or worse” kind of way. I eventually stopped watching horror movies, although this was as much because of what was happening to the genre. The relatively unsophisticated slasher movies of our youth have now largely decayed into the type of torture-porn garbage exemplified by the Saw and Hostel franchises. I also stopped reading graphically violent novels. Cancer was the ultimate horror story, because it was real and you had no idea how the plot would turn out. I did make a notable exception for Stephen King, who I always found to be more psychologically disturbing than overtly violent. In the end I found that the energy of holidays like Thanksgiving drew me in and comforted me; the energy surrounding Halloween did much the opposite.

Perhaps it was due to the personal medical symbolism of the date, or the cumulative effects of the aforementioned aversions, but in the first few years of my wife’s recovery we either left the porch light off and ignored the doorbell on Halloween, or made plans to be somewhere besides home when the trick-or-treaters came calling. Over the ensuing years we slowly made our way back to answering the door, motivated by trying to find a degree of enjoyment in the occasion rather than wallowing in its implications and wanting to not punish neighborhood children on behalf of our own fears and frailties. But my deepest source of disconnection with this holiday remained, and was profoundly powerful in its constancy: In its very heart, Halloween is a children’s holiday, and cancer was the provocation that moved us off the path to becoming a family. The parade of young pirates and princesses that appeared at our door each Halloween was an innocent and unintended reminder of a life that was nearly ours, and another realization that I was not out trick-or-treating with children of my own. We have found numerous ways to emulate parenthood — being an aunt and uncle, babysitting, working with a middle school — but even though these bring much gratification on many levels, in some senses they remain pallid biological proxies. These are not regrets that come calling each day, but Halloween seems to emphasize and intensify these feelings. In the late, quiet hours of fall when the world is still and my head is busy, the question of legacy is the one that brings only more questions. This is the lone sadness and regret that can still undo me from time to time.

The writer Andre Aciman observed that “Sometimes it is in blind ritual and not faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit, not character, that makes us who we are”. He did not seem to be implying that the muscle memory of the ritual itself can sustain us when our convictions falter, rather that it is often not what we believe that brings us closer to divinity – only the action we take based on that belief; the faith put into actual practice. I believe the converse is also possible: That as we become progressively more disconnected from the history and origins of our holidays (holy days), our rituals risk becoming nothing more than hollow motions. The path to acceptance – or at least to a state of emotional détente – then appears to lead in part through the making of conscious and mindful choices about what we want these singular days to mean to us, but mostly in acting in ways that exemplify these choices.

For me, this has now led to a greater interest in and appreciation for observances like the Day of the Dead, where the focus isn’t on costumes, carved pumpkins, and mindless spending on trinkets, but on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It does not erase the progenitory wound, but it has led to seeing the children in the extended familial and social circles of our lives as miracles to be welcomed and embraced. It has also led to the new ritual of Halloween for us as a neighborhood function – an opportunity to gather and celebrate as a community. Sugar still figures prominently, as does the questionable balance of fantasy and horror when it comes to costumes, and I still struggle with the crass commercialization pervading all our holidays, but in this new context we have found a measure of peace, a further personal and intimate connection that perhaps brings us a step closer to experiencing the true magic of All Hallows’ Eve.