One question I am often asked towards the end of October is: ‘Do you have Halloween in England?’
I’ve been asked this question and responded to it enough to realize that I am not being asked if the ancient pagan fall festivals like the Celtic Samhain that predate American culture and grew into what we now know as ‘Halloween’ exist over the pond but rather if groups of children dress up and go from door to door soliciting candy with the phrase ‘trick or treat’.
I do hear there is some trick or treating in the U.K. now but it is all still relatively small scale and has not really taken off so I answer ‘no’ and go on to explain:
‘We don’t do Halloween, we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night instead on 5th of November and that fulfills our need for the pagan fall festival.”
This statement, if the enquirer is actually seeking a dialogue and not merely chattering along the soundtrack of their preselected thoughts, will provoke the further question: ‘What is Guy Fawkes night?’
I then explain that it is a night devoted to making an effigy of the Catholic Terrorist, Guy Fawkes, and burning him on a large bonfire as a warning against Papist imperialists.
At this point most people check out, sometimes voicing the thought that I might be making it up or stating that they, ‘never know when I’m joking’.
To give these people fair due, I do have a droll sense of humor that can bend towards the surreal. For example, I have been known to state with apparent sincerity that ‘Bjork’ is actually the Icelandic word for ‘shrill little troll’. However, Guy Fawkes Night is real. I’ve just checked Wikipedia and it’s not a vivid delusion of my own concoction. We called it Bonfire Night in my area as a child and many Guys were made and burned in my youth. Large public firework displays accompany the bonfires now. I also hear that things are changing and it’s becoming more like ‘Halloween’. The homemade bonfire toffee, the black chewy treacle drooly deliciousness of my youth, is being replaced by generic ghost and ghoul themed candies. Children are not building effigies as much as they once did and are not parading them around and asking strangers for ‘A penny for the Guy’ as is traditional.
The funny thing is, that while I know what people mean when they ask me about Halloween, namely the children and the masked promenading for candy I’ve never actually witnessed this myself in America even though I’ve lived here for many years.
It is only now that I’ve had my first real experience of the great tradition. We’ve just never lived in a neighborhood with kids so it’s mostly been a time of adult costume parties with horror film themes. In Chicago we lived in the top floor of an enclosed apartment block. In San Francisco in ’96 it was a crazy street carnival but again, no children.
We’ve observed Dia de Los Muertos a couple of times in San Diego, once going over to Tijuana and last year touring the decorated graves in Old Town, but I’ve never really seen the full of convoy of kids going door to door with the old ‘trick or treat’ routine.
I’m am therefore very happy to report that it does in fact exist and it is as delightful, charming and hilarious as episodes of sitcoms and nostalgic Ron Howard movies would have you believe.
My friend JR lives in South Park and it’s a cute neighborhood with set back houses with lots of young families. He invited us over to sit on his porch and drink a beer and hand out candy with him. Last year he said it was so busy that he ran out of candy in an hour.
We arrived about seven and it was all in full flow. He’s a set designer and he’d covered the porch with fake cobwebs and the neighborhood was alive with people. Most of the costumes were home made. Mario Brothers were popular. There were a lot of Princesses. The young ones were the cutest, struggling up the steps in bumblebee stripes and having difficulty managing their stuck on wings. They often had to be coached in the one key line by grinning, doting parents.
‘And what are you tonight?’
‘A cape.’
‘A CAPE!’
The things children say, it’s always funny. A confident fat kid arrived and declared he was Zoro but he looked more like a mariachi and was lacking a sword. One kid told us she was ‘A Chinese person’, which was odd and launched us into a big discussion about political correctness.
There was a toddler dressed as a shrimp who was just way too adorable.
JR wore a false beard and was trying to instill a new set of rules this year since he’d run out of candy last year because parents had helped themselves to the treat bowl. This did not seem right and in fact there was a definite awkwardness about some of the exchanges at times with people who were way too old to be collecting candy. So he and his roommate had got an adult basket together for those too old to get treats. The adult basket contained condoms. It was an interesting idea and it proved difficult to enforce since the parents really wanted candy and not condoms and many of the parents were middle-aged Latino women, with little English and were probably Catholic and had received instruction not to block their husband’s semen in any way, so it was kind of embarrassing to see the look on their faces when they discovered what they’d got.
‘I feel more comfortable giving condoms to the men’, said JR after a few dips in the adult box.
‘Yeah, you’ve got to be careful, you could get in trouble, some of the young women dressed as slutty vampires might actually be underage.’
The teenagers on the cusp of adult hood were my favorite group. They were all clearly struggling with the idea that trick or treating may not be ‘cool’ or age appropriate for them anymore and yet they obviously enjoyed being out at night with friends and getting free candy. You could see the cognitive dissonance at play on their faces, teens who normally put effort into trying to be accepted as older suddenly have to decide that they are in fact not older and it’s fine for them to dress up as a chipmunk and go and pick up mini chocolates from the neighbors.
JR put each of them through the whole ritual, making them deliver the trick or treat line and then forcing them to explain their costume. Each question was a challenge with the subtext, are you really old enough to be doing this?
One sulky teen told us she was ‘From the 80’s’. Another one said she had come as ‘Prom Night’.
Shrill little troll! Ahahaha, oh how I love your wit! :)
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