Halloween

I actually lost interest in Halloween trick or treating early, at twelve or so.  It just felt like a little kid thing to me.  Did you know that trick or treating was developed only in the 1930s and '40s, as an alternative to more rowdy behaviour?  

There was a funny episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David wouldn't give a treat to a teenage girl whose idea of a costume was a T-shirt with a scarf, so she trashed his whole front yard, then he complained to her father, who turned out to be this guy who'd been calling David a bad Jew and started shouting him down, so David hired an orchestra to play Wagner in front of the guy's house!

Halloween is interesting in its pagan roots.  It started out as the Celtic Samhain festival, and the jack o' lantern is very Celtic imagery.  Halloween as we know it was brought to America by the Scottish and Irish. 

The Christian church characteristically co-opted Samhain by putting All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day the day after. (The first is a day for all the saints, and the second is for all the regular dead, sort of like Mensa and Densa.) In Mexico All Souls Day has become the Day of the Dead, with candy skulls and such, in a way that reflects pre-Columbian culture.

I haven't gone to a Halloween party for years.  Some years back I went to one as a beatnik, wearing a glued-on beard, a turtleneck and blazer, shades and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it because of that footage of Monica Lewinsky in a beret giving President Clinton a hug.)