All Hollow's Eve

I expected my next blog entry to deal with my honeymoon. Instead, I’ve decided to intersperse my tales-from-the-honeymoon series with other “regular” posts, so as to keep things fresh and titillating for my readers. (Aren’t “fresh and titillating” the exact words that always come to your mind when you read my blog???)

And so it is that, inspired my dearest mother’s most recent post, I have decided to examine my thoughts on Halloween. It is a day that, for an incredibly mature adult such as myself, has very little aesthetic appeal. Not once this year, nor in any year of recent memory, has the thought of relishing in Halloween festivities even occurred to me. I’m as likely to skip past the overflowing Halloween displays at my local grocery store as I am the feminine hygiene products. It is adverse to my very nature to even consider pausing to peruse such paraphernalia.

Lest you think this is the adult in me talking, I have no memory of extreme Halloween excitement existing within me as a child. I have vague notions of delighting in my costume year after year, but never did I ecstatically await the end of the month once October rolled around. Never did I foam at the mouth as I anticipated my early evening descent into the city streets, eager to claim my bounteous booty of bubble gum, Blow Pops, and Baby Ruths. And never, even when the said spoils had been seized, did I struggle with eating them in moderation. The only items to tease my tastebuds were candy bars, and even then I was an exclusionist—nougat-dominant bars such as Milky Way and Three Musketeers had no place in my diet, nor did chocolate-only confections (a plain Hershey’s or, heaven forbid, a Special Dark). In all likelihood, 96% of my candy would end up in the garbage sometime around Valentine’s Day.

No, the only Halloween excitement for me was donning a new identity, whether it was the Purple Pie Man or a punk rocker, a classic Mafia man or Dr. Pickanose (a character of my own making, complete with novelty Groucho Marx eyewear), a hermaphroditic devil or a Greek god of beauty (wrapped in a toga made of Rainbow Brite bed sheets). But as I’ve gotten older, the only costumes that sound clever enough to be worth wearing are also not worth the time and/or effort necessary to obtain them. (The only temptation I have had is dressing up as Socrates, because I am a philosophy guy, and having my wife dress up as Play-Doh, because she is a Kindergarten teacher. Because this pairing would not only provide a clever play on words but would also utilize our personal interests, it is the most worthwhile idea had in years. But even still, we haven’t bothered.)

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not anti-Halloween or anything. If I see a kid reveling in the occasion, I’m going to find it cute. I might, every other year or so, go to a haunted house or rent a theoretically scary movie, just because the excuse is there. When I have my own kids, I certainly expect to get caught up in their excitement. And, even now, Halloween affords me the annual tradition of eating hearty beef stew and delectable Parmesan breadsticks at my in-laws’ house. This is a tradition I look forward to and would be sad to miss. But, in and of itself, the holiday seems rather pointless. It may very well be the first holiday I’d give up if one had to be relinquished. Heck, you don’t even get a day off work or school (unless you live in Nevada, where the state’s “birthday” is October 31st). Maybe if I had more of a sweet tooth, I could find the onslaught of candy worthwhile. As it is, I find All Hallow’s Eve fairly hollow.