I suspect the craze for Halloween among American adults has its roots in the Millennial Generation who seem to embrace any excuse for a party. Pretty soon they are going to be celebrating Hump Day each week with a little get together featuring that amusing wine. Yes, I know, I sound like a curmudgeon raining on the parade. Seriously, do we actually need to spend $300 million dollars on pet costumes? I found that little nugget in a timeline of Halloween I read in a magazine the other day.
It turns out our American Halloween has some pretty shallow roots. Costumes started up in 1912, and handing out candy really got going in the 1920's to minimize property damage caused by 'tricks'. The zenith of 'kid Halloween' was, of course, the 1950's when the Baby Boomers were children. On a personal note, collecting candy on Halloween was one of the twice a year days I actually GOT candy. With careful husbandry, judicious trading after the actual trick or treat trip, AND a clever hiding place my little brother couldn't find, I could stretch my Halloween candy to Easter - if Easter came early enough. Any Easter Sunday in April meant a candy famine for me.
My mother didn't believe children should eat candy. It rotted teeth, and it was too expensive to buy frivolously throughout the year. Most 1950's middle class mothers had similar beliefs. Growing up during the 1930's many of them had no dental care as children, and they vividly remembered the pain of tooth decay. My mother was missing several jaw teeth - pulled as a result of advanced tooth decay when she was very young. That said, they could not deny their children candy on Halloween night and in Easter baskets, but they could hold the line to those two days.
That made Halloween the third best day of the year. (The first two best days were your birthday and Christmas, duh.) Halloween was unsupervised night time activity; a once a year thrilling occurrence. Because of the era, outside daytime play was pretty much always unsupervised, but when dark fell, every kid I knew was expected to be in his or her house. During the school year, there was supper, some possible lightweight homework, usually less than 10 minutes in duration, and family watched TV on one of the three channels until bath and your rigidly set 'bed time'. Trick or treating on Halloween got you a pass from the routine schedule.
My brother and I, together with our selected neighborhood friends, roamed blocks on Halloween night collecting the loot. Our only restriction was we weren't supposed to cross a street with a traffic light even if the woman on the other side of the forbidden street was giving out homemade popcorn balls and caramel apples. With dozens of houses on long blocks of suburban subdivisions, this was not really a hardship. Ninety percent of the porch lights were on and open for the important business of passing out candy. No information passed faster among trick or treating children than the skinny about a household giving out chocolate bars or homemade treats. Getting anything chocolate was a 'score'. There was lots of Double Bubble being passed out on a Baby Boomer Halloween night.
The real hardest thing was waiting for dark, and in my house that meant full dark. We couldn't go out until it was truly night time. Only the five year olds went out when it was twilight. Nobody under the age of five trick or treated. Parents didn't have either the time or inclination to follow their kids around on Halloween. Who would answer the doorbell? During Baby Boomer times, you could easily hand out candy to more than 100 kids. It was also an unwritten rule the year you left elementary school, trick or treating days were strictly OVER. Still, by 1965 (the end of the Boomer era) Americans were spending $300 million on Halloween. Go back to the first paragraph: TODAY we spend $300 million on pet costumes. Oh, for the simple times when dogs stayed in the back yard, and cats minded their own business wherever they chose dropping by occasionally to eat.
In reality the adult fascination for Halloween is the outcome of traditional trick or treating being severely curtailed by mostly rumors of poisoned candy and sharp objects inserted into apples, and the uneasy feeling our children were not safe on the streets. Awful things only have to happen once - like the one guy who put explosives in his shoes - and now we all have to take off our shoes to get on an airplane. Even though poisoned candy is mostly an urban myth according to Joel Best, a sociologist at Delaware University who specializes in candy tampering legends, the documented 1974 poisoned pixie sticks in Deer Park, Texas, killed Halloween for every child in America, and changed who really gets to celebrate. Those poor dressed up pets are just the big losers, well, after children that is.
Dressing up in some rented costume, drinking too much, and competing in a meaningless costume competition with your friends is just too much trouble for me. I celebrate Halloween with my own bag of candy corn (first sold in 1951) - Brach's, of course, made with real honey, and I enjoy it, but not nearly as much as the stuff I tramped blocks and blocks to acquire. So, Happy Halloween, and for Pete's sake, give your pets a break and leave off dressing them up. Of course, that's so hard to resist with websites like this one giving you evil ideas:
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