No surprise, Halloween has changed, and those changes are very meaningful. They map the changes in American society and its place in the world.
As someone of a certain age, my evaluation of Halloween can easily fall into the nostalgia for youth, a time when the world was somehow pure, following that American romanticism of small towns, suburbs, and coming of age.
Sure, I remember making my own costume--already a kind of obstreperous rebellion against commercial costumes that filled stores in the strip mall about a mile away from home. I also remember, sword in hand and armor on chest, leaving the safe boundary of my immediate neighborhood into a world of shadows and potential nightmares beyond the well known to knock on unknown doors, that seemed just like the ones in my neighborhood strangely, yelling out “trick or treat” and receiving candy along with oohs and ahs for the creativity of my and my friend’s juvenile costumes.
Returning home, with a bag overflowing with candy from strangers was the point, this adolescent turned anthropologist thinks, all the while nostalgia lurks like a haunt just beyond the corners of my text.
Of course I also carry in my head tales from my father, of his Halloween. Strangely I have none from my mother, nor from my grandparents, whether American or European. And the way I remember my father’s stories may be, itself, strangely telling.
I do not know what this patrilateral bias means, although it may just be a reflection of my gender at the same time it may reflect a possibility that Halloween during the thirties when my dad was a youth may have been a time when hoards of boys roamed free and girls did not. My memories may also speak to the growth of this once Irish feast as part of a national American culture during the great period of Americanization and urbanization in the interwar period of the twentieth century. But I do not know that and I am not going to take the time to go to the history books to see if there is writing on this subject. All I really have are my stories anyway.
My dad would tell of how he and his friends would engage in trickery during Halloween, such as putting carts and cars on top of barns. They would invert the world, this boy become anthropologist thinks, in a carnivalesque, in their safe, Mormon village called Holladay that already was on the way to becoming an upscale suburb. They practiced an art that has a strange word that I only know because my dad used it and I have heard other old timers speak of it, but the custom was long dead by my day. The word was chivaree, and I really can only guess at how to spell it. It is an oral, and not a written, word for me. It comes in the tones of my dad’s early twentieth century Salt Lake twang.
OK. I could not resist and so I looked up the word. It is formally spelled charivari, and is said to be French, though the word became reduced and my dad’s pronunciation is recognized in alternative spellings. But without Google I do not know that, though I think I have read about that French word before.
My dad in his village formed pard of a set of boys who roamed mostly as a group, an age set in a Mormon village and ward (religious congregation), since those mostly overlapped. They were the adolescents and then teenagers, and on Halloween while perhaps at other times, tricksters. This is a Mormon world which in my experience, i.e. the times of my life, seems strangely lacking in tricksters.
For me, halloween as about a small set of friends of even a best friend who accompanied me on our quest for the grail of life beyond our neighborhood in confronting the dragons of strangeness and the unknown.
My halloween and my father’s, as a result, were very different and related to very different societies. Mine was a suburban life of nuclear families and a racially and ethnically segregated world of the Upper Valley in El Paso, while my dad’s was Holladay at a time of massive change.
Since I was young, many other things have changed in the world. Surburbs took over the urban world (outside of ghettos and zones of poverty and some Bohemian life) and first television, then movies, followed by cable and the internet, then fast food took over the life of me and my peers, and succeeding generations.
People began to be terrified of social spaces, as manifested in the image of a razor blade in a halloween apple, or cyanide in candy. They retreated into the walls of their suburban homes and the safe networks of their religious congregations and other social networks, where they felt safe. At the same time, their worlds became more and more those of individual spectators watching from screens at home and outside the home: they and the universe, although that universe was more and more fragmented and divided.
Not surprisingly, as today dawned and I was on my train commuting to work, the sunlight shown on people beyond the age of children or adolescents dressed in costumes from mass, popular culture. They are cartoon figures, or movie figures, or celebrities.
As Halloween approaches (Thursday is its day while today is Monday), families take their kids to trunk or treats, safe places where known people can give them safe candy, an interesting image of the value of bounded and known social networks for getting things, instead of an image of village solidarity and trickery, or my questing outward beyond the known into society.
Holidays are no longer celebrated only on their dates but spread outward in alliance with markets and the idea that Sundays and Mondays play special roles, whether of relaxation and fun or of spirituality and relaxation, in a world dominated by work and its logic. It is a world where the market and society increasingly follow the Weberian ideal of us becoming ever more ensnared in the logic of formal rationality. He called it a steel-hard shell, or in some translations, an iron cage. It seems more--these days, a Procrustean bed.
And, in these times, identities and style seem more and more strongly defined by mass culture, rather than coming from other sources invested in villages or communities as the mediators of larger and smaller culture. Instead it is the individual facing the universe through consumption of culture.
I know that there will be no kids coming to my door this Halloween since I am part of no family networks. The supermarket, or membership warehouse, will have to survive, as a result, with out my purchase of candy.
The Halloween I knew is gone, safely in my nostalgic memories of innocence, including the innocence of my father’s trickery. But this current Halloween still seems very meaningful.
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