Fear and trembling

Now and then I’m accused, usually for goods reasons, of being insensitive. At the year’s end, when the subject of new year’s resolutions comes up, I don’t write anything down, but I remind myself that insensitivity is a demon I haven’t exorcised. It’s a lifelong struggle.

Putting on a show

So I counted it a personal victory when I realized how insensitively we celebrate Halloween. Of all our yearly observances, it’s the cruelest and most misguided. Millions of adults annually go out of their way to scare the bejesus out of little kids. They delude themselves by imagining that kids enjoy it, but the small fry have misled them. To save face, they’ll tell you, “Yow! I think my heart stopped! Ha ha ha!” Fright is supposedly fun. Just ask any roller coaster junky.

I sense you doubting me. You cling to the idea that little kids like grotesque things that go “Boo!” I admit that I’ve kept no notebook of Halloween observations, but I’ve seen enough — and so have you — to know that our tender years are fearful times. A child can conjure up dreadful images. The movie Monsters Inc. would have flopped if this weren’t true. Still unsure? Well, have you ever visited the Haunted House at Disneyland? You don’t see many of the under-10 crowd queueing up for it. More infamous was the original Snow White ride. It left kids shrieking and sobbing as they emerged from the diamond mine. Disney revamped the ride 7 years ago. The sudden confrontation with the evil witch is gone.

How did we come to condone the terrorizing of little children? It’s been a glacial process that shares a common thread with Christmas and Easter, even though it has no Judeo-Christian roots. It originally marked the end of the Celtic year, when the harvest was done and the world became colder and darker. At this transitional time, the Celts imagined that the spirits of the dead left their moldering burial sites and communed for a short time with the living. Irreverent Celtic youths entertained themselves by dressing as these spirits and promising to divulge their knowledge of the future for small gifts of food. Such was the original form of trick-or-treating. Eventually, the Romans came to Celtic Britain and conveyed the custom to the rest of the empire. One might wish that the Romans had been more discriminating about what they spread.

Over the course of two millennia, Halloween became childish. That is, it was given over to children. The same happened to Christmas, and Easter is well down that road. The Celtic dead, who were regarded with a modicum of reverence, evolved into bands of children playing dress-up and trolling the neighborhood for goodies. Christmas became populated by fairy tale creatures — elves, reindeer, Rudolph, snowmen, Frosty, Jack Frost, and foremost, Santa, the God of Gifts. Christ is pretty much a nonentity so far as children are concerned, and adults give him a faint honorable mention. At Easter, Christ barely holds his own with adults, who treat their children to new clothes, chocolate bunnies, baskets of candy, egg dying, and egg hunts.

How is it that Halloween has held on to its heritage of horror? I have two explanations. One is that a nontrivial minority of us are adrenalin-addicted. Hence the success of amusement parks and horror movies. Hence the interest in sky diving, bungee jumping, and climbing vertical surfaces with no gear. Hence the fascination with tightrope walkers, cliff divers, race car drivers, and rocket-propelled canyon jumpers. Millions of years of evolution shout, “No, wrong, back off!” but gee, Mother Nature can be such a stick-in-the-mud!

My other explanation involves virtue signaling, a repugnant behavior in which America leads the world. It isn’t enough for signalers to display Old Glory the year-round. They are compelled to erect extravagant displays on their front yards every Halloween and Christmas. It’s an exultant cry of pride in their excellence as members of the tribe. My next door neighbors, for example, have enclosed their strip of sidewalk with an archway of PVC piping encircled by twinkling lights. Adjacent to the archway is a Halloween gauntlet. You pass in turn beside a cackling witch holding a jack-o’-lantern, a bullying headless horseman, and a springing tarantula. Terrify the kiddies, and the electricity bill be damned!

How about a Halloween devoid of shock and awe? Keep the dress-up. Keep the handouts of goodies. Keep the pumpkins and wreaths of fall leaves. But get rid of the ghosts, goblins, witches, skeletons, and multitude of ghouls. All right, all right … keep the screeching black cat.