While trick or treating with my daughter one year, I went down to the basement flat next door to where I lived. Although I had never seen any children in there, they had a lit pumpkin in the window, so were obviously expecting young visitors. A cheery guy answered, dressed in a basic Halloween costume, with a bolt through his neck or something. “We do have some sweets,” he said, “but I think your daughter might be a bit scared of my girlfriend’s costume.” “Oh, she’s fine. She looks five, but she’s made of iron filings,” I replied breezily, and he gave me some “your funeral” eyebrows and called for the Haribos.
His girlfriend was wearing a gigantic prosthetic pregnant belly, with a doll’s head bursting out of it, stabbed through with quite a fancy kitchen knife, the whole thing caked in blood and what looked – it was quite dark – like the beginning of some organs spilling out from behind. Repulsed by her imagination, I was nevertheless awestruck by the amount of effort she had put in. I couldn’t stop to congratulate her. “Take the sweets, and run,” I said to my daughter, in the quiet, urgent voice I reserve for when we have broken something in a shop. “Sorry,” said my depraved neighbour. “I didn’t realise there were so many kids living round here.” “Don’t worry, at her height she probably just saw the bandages and thought you were a mummy.”
Halloween is not a creeping Americanisation, as people who hate it often assert. If we were going to lift their festivals wholesale, we would have started with Thanksgiving, the carnival of true licence, where you can authentically put sugar in everything without ever having to dress up. Nor does it fit anywhere into the British tradition of celebrations confected for the purposes of all-day drinking – royal weddings, football tournaments, soon (mark me) royal births. It is a straight act of cultural appropriation, adults eyeing up a children’s affair and thinking: “Hang on, though: who says I can’t dress up as Iron Man, enjoy a temporary six pack and run around screaming with my friends?”
This has happened right across the board. Christmas used to be explicitly for the kiddies. We would flog a mass fantasy to them and, as their powers of observation grew and caused them to become suspicious, gaslight them until they learned not to take us so seriously. I can’t remember the long game, (I am sure there was one), but it definitely did not require adults to believe and, relatedly, did not require us to make our houses smell of oranges and mace, nor reflect upon the year gone by. Now it is necessary to take a stance – you must love it or hate it – and build it into the emotional rhythm of your year. Probably, right now, you should be soaking some dried fruit.
Easter is the most peculiar: for a few years this decade, I have written reviews of chocolate Easter eggs. They can cost more than hand-rearing a whole lamb and learning how to butcher it yourself, and there is always a strategic ingredient (chilli, brandy) to put kids off. Some are nice and some are beyond disgusting, but it is never easy to figure out the core audience. Not Christians: chocolate at Easter offends some of them. But what would an atheist be doing dropping £100 on sweets that taste like guacamole?
It’s not the adults I blame. Mass-fun is like mass-hysteria: it is hard to resist and peculiarly buoying, and you often don’t feel stupid until much later. I really blame children for not policing this better.
