But there's something else, something deeper, a value in All Hallows Eve that pushes back against a decay in our culture. It was present in my first Halloween, back in 1975, when I donned a cheap plastic Casper mask and trundled out into our neighborhood. I was six, but my last four October 31sts had been spent in Kenya, where celebrating that day ain't a thing. So this was all new, this American festival, and it didn't disappoint. As dusk fell, our street was filled with kids, and with adults, with the laughter of neighbors reacquainting. Older children bustled about in little self-governing collectives, as the adults were off having drinks with other adults.
With Mom and my little brother along, we went door to door in the growing darkness, our bags filling with candy.
A random neighbor with a pickup truck had filled his pickup with hay and haybales, and was offering impromptu hayrides up and down the main street of the neighborhood. I was lifted up into the back with a dozen other children. My brother, being four, was getting a little freaked out by all the hubbub, and didn't join me, so Mom stayed with him. I whisked off into the evening with a truckbed full of children I didn't know, not a single one of us in a car seat, or even a seat. The wind was brisk and cool, kids were laughing and showing off costumes, hollering at other trick or treaters, and bragging about their candy hauls. It all felt like a little bit of a wild rumpus.
That's what Halloween, as a national festival, felt like. It was and is a neighborly holiday, a time for children to meet other neighborhood children, and adults to meet the other adults who lived around them.
As such, All Hallows Eve is anomalous and a little endangered, because in our anxious culture, we don't do slow or local well. We don't know the people who inhabit the same space that we inhabit, as parental sociality is increasingly defined by planned children's activities, social media engagement, and our deepening and generalized distrust of the world.
Into that stress-mess comes Trunk or Treat.
It's a well-meaning thing, as most innovations are. You go to a church, where the lot is filled with cars. Maybe also a moonbounce. Or a face painting station, if they gettin' fancy. It's at a more convenient time, it's contained, and it's safe, and there's very little walking involved. You pull in, unload the becostumed progeny, and boom. Done and did in time to get them to toddler taekwondo. For the organizations sponsoring these events, it's ideal from a demographic standpoint. Young! Families! To tell the complete truth, it isn't necessarily always terrible. If you're country folk, it can be necessary, particularly where rural neighbors are at a great distance and it's the only way to get together.
But if you can trick or treat, trunk or treat is socially inferior, by orders of magnitude. It feels like a symptom of the loss of authentic neighborliness, which has been supplanted of late with synthetic, temporary, and inorganic substitutes. It's a manifestation of consumer expectations and overscheduled childhoods. It offers "safety" and "convenience," but at the price of community.
Because who isn't at Trunk or Treat?
Everyone who isn't a parent of small children.
The elderly woman, living alone, whose family are distant. Empty nesters missing their kids. A house filled with recent migrants. A young couple still awaiting their first child. A gay couple. Teens clinging to the last vestiges of their childhood. These, as Sesame Street once sang it, are the people in your neighborhood.
Do you know them? Know their faces and voices? More often than not, you don't.
"And who," a friend of mine once pointedly said, "is your neighbor?" We honestly haven't a clue, in these days of madly rushing about. We roar on by them, stressed and in traffic, already late to our next event.
It's a loss.
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