Post-Halloween Reflections: In Defense of That One House

I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t write this post. Ah, screw it.

So Halloween is over for another year. Jack O’Lanterns are rotting on their porches. Hollow plastic pumpkins have been filled and emptied again. Costumes have been traded in for 364-other-days-of-the-year wear. The internet, for its part, can be found leaning back in its recliner, the elastic waistband of its sweatpants stretched even further by its ever expanding gut, now several terabytes fatter from the mass of Halloween pictures uploaded to it by parents everywhere. Like this one:

The apathetic little cherub is my youngest. And that guy in the back? I don’t know who he is or what he’s supposed to be. A thief perhaps? How the two came to be in the same picture together, well you see, my friends and I decided that our offspring would have more fun trick or treating together and that we grown-ups would have more fun drinking beer together, so in order to make all this togetherness happen, we met up at one couple’s house and proceeded from there. And as there is in nearly every hood, there was That One House, the one that really goes all out for Halloween. Dead viking farmers in the yard. 
Blood stains here and there. Creepy sounds emanating from within. A witch and whatever-the-hell-that-guy-is sat at the door, cackling, growling, and handing out candy. Seeing as how the oldest kid in our group is just barely four, we actually hesitated a second before approaching. Still, the allure of candy won out and they soldiered on up, and we parents followed their little leads.

When I was going back through my pictures from the evening, that image above and the story it tells made me laugh. At a couple months shy of a couple of years old, my youngest truly didn’t seem bothered by any of this ghoulishness. To him, the man in the silly makeup making all those gurgly noises was just the guy sitting next to the green-faced lady in the pointy hat with the huge bowl of candy in her lap.

On the other hand, what this picture doesn’t show is my oldest son across the street a few minutes later, shaking like a leaf at the sight of the Grim Reaper standing at the curb waving its scythe, while tortured echoey screams blasted out of the windows behind him. Or my friend’s son, who later that evening asked her to drive the other way so that they wouldn’t have to pass by the house with the witches.

So yes, in this case, That One House was a bit much for some of our weefolk. And sure, I've heard horror stories of assholes going a bit too far to wring screams from the too young. And while I may joke about putting on a hockey mask and chasing my kids with a chainsaw, I would probably be incited to violence were someone to actually do that.

But then again, I don't know. It is Halloween. Scary goes with the territory. True, a lot of the associated imagery alludes to death, dead things, things that make you dead, etc. but all things considered, it's a damn safe holiday. There's less travel involved than Thanksgiving or whatever you celebrate in December, and certainly less stress, so there's two very real danger factors removed right away. And as this most excellent article points out, the many dire warnings that come out every October present a starkly different picture than the reality of Halloween:

"...the fact is: No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you."

Texas!?!?! No! NOOOO!!!! GET AWAY!!!! Oh wait, I live there.

So yeah, Halloween is that big burly guy with the Slayer tee-shirt and a bunch of tattoos that plays drums in a band called Satan's Goat Lover who helps his elderly neighbor carry her groceries and plays catch with the neighborhood kids, except, of course, for the ones who whose parents won’t let them.

I'm not saying it's cool to go trying to scare the crap out of little kids, as that would be bullying. I'm just saying, I'm glad That One House exists, in our imaginations and in neighborhoods everywhere. I'm glad to know that Halloween, as dangerous as it may purport to be, is still a pretty kid-friendly affair. The things that really scare me are not the kinds of things I want to dwell upon, especially not while there’s candy on the loose. I don't want to dress up as cancer, or regret, or year upon year of loneliness. I want candy in my bucket, not unemployment checks or shards of broken windshield. Give me a haunted house, not a foreclosed one. And let the pint-sized ghosts running around the house be nothing more than children laughing under sheets.