Written by ANDREA GOTO
GROWING UP, HALLOWEEN WAS ALWAYS one of my favorite holidays. My sister and I would scour the pattern books at the fabric store for inspiration (our version of Instagram) and create costumes from the “dress-up box” — literally a cardboard box in the attic — filled with an odd assortment of musty-smelling wigs, Mom’s pageant gowns and motorcycle-gang paraphernalia from Dad’s sordid past.
Over the years, we managed to cull together what I now realize were culturally insensitive versions of a geisha, “Dutch girl,” gypsy, caveman and more. Then, at dusk, we’d race around the neighborhood in search of the houses with the “big” candy and warn our friends about the houses with fruit. Dad tried to count off how many trick-or-treaters came by, and yet we’d still always run out of candy.
It was a beautiful thing.
Then, sometime around the mid-’80s, something changed. People started to seem more afraid of everything, from Gorbachev and AIDS to Halley’s Comet and Michael Jackson’s moonwalking abilities. Halloween became particularly scary with talk of doorstep abductions, drug-laced candy and razor blades embedded in apples. Mom began insisting that we stick together and only visit the “good houses” — the ones whose tidy yards and ample light suggested safety.
We had to inspect all of our candy before eating it, painfully parting with any piece that appeared to be tampered with. As the years drew on, the number of trick-or-treaters dwindled. Parents started taking their kids store-to-store at the mall instead of door-to-door in their own neighborhoods. Eventually, my parents turned off their porch light and stopped buying candy altogether. As I got older, I did the same.
When my husband and I moved into a quiet neighborhood on Wilmington Island, I heard rumors of a next-level Halloween celebration and saw decorations beginning to go up the day after Labor Day. And I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill plastic pumpkins and stick-on window witches; I’m talking 30-foot skeletons, pyrotechnics, fog machines and full-on yard installations telling stories of ghost pirates and werewolves, a haunted “Hell House” and a fire-breathing dragon.
On Halloween, thousands of costumed kids and adults descended upon the neighborhood. A parade of people clogged the streets, and kids darted from house to house, laughing and screaming. It was like that iconic Halloween scene in “E.T.” — it felt and looked surreal. I ran out of candy within the first 20 minutes, so we joined the throngs and walked aimlessly in awe of how our community kept the spirit of Halloween alive.
It was a beautiful thing.
I’d eventually learn to buy candy by the bales and raid the day-after-Halloween sales to stockpile decorations for the following year. My husband has upped his costume game to the point where he spent 12 months assembling an authentic-looking proton pack that he’s a little too proud of. And our daughter has grown up experiencing the joy of Halloween rather than listening to her parents wax nostalgic about better times.
That’s not to say that things are perfect. There are still some off-brand Tootsie Rolls in the bunch that try to ruin it for the good candy. But for the most part, I’m more afraid of the creepy costumed folks at the Hell House than I am of anything else. It’s good to know that communities like this exist, and if they don’t, we can still build them.
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