The War on Halloween

A few years ago, Bill O’Reilly got Republican evangelists ready to revolt over the War on Christmas. Today, I would like to turn your attention to another example of tradition haters ruining the infrastructure of American society: the war on Halloween.

Surely, you have noticed the war on Halloween, haven’t you? It’s been brewing for quite some time, actually. I think it began sometime in the early 1990s, when the outside-interest folks decided that had no business hosting Halloween themed events—thus, the boom in “fall festival” festivities all across the southern United States ever since.

For some reason, Halloween has become a verboten term in the environment. Remember when you were a kid, and on Oct. 31, you were allowed to come to school dressed as robots, ninjas and vampires? Well, the kids of today aren’t so fortunate, since the last day of October is no longer All Hallows Eve, but “Dress Up As Your Favorite Book Character Day” or some other equally insulting placeholder for one of our culture’s most cherished civic traditions.

When was the last time you saw a Halloween parade or a or even heard a cashier tell you “Happy Halloween” when you lugged a 10-pound bag of Gummy Worms to the checkout counter? As one insightful youngster recently quipped, these days it’s not so much Halloween as it is “Hallow-weak” in northwest Georgia.

I really wasn’t going to raise a stink about the issue until I found out about one of the most horrible displays of childhood-deprivation I’ve ever heard. The thing that surprised me most about this abomination wasn’t simply the fact that it exists, it is the fact that it is a fairly common, fairly accepted custom here in the region. Perhaps you’ve heard of this inexcusable, sickening display of over-parenting: Trunk-or-treating.

Trunk-or-treating.

Has the world really gotten that unsafe since I was a kid? According to just about every reliable stats-keeping bureau out there, incidents of violent crime and child abduction have dropped considerably over the last 20 years. Even that long-standing seasonal worry that kids might ingest poisoned food has been proved to be an urban legend: Over the last 40 years, a grand total of five incidents of the like have transpired, and in that pretty much all of them, the assailant was a relative that purposely acted to injure their kinfolk. That’s sort of the unspoken truth about kidnapping and violence against children in the modern era: Odds are, if someone is going to harm your kid, it isn’t going to be a complete stranger, but somebody you see at the Thanksgiving table each year.

So what gives? Why are parents so afraid to let their children wander away from the nice, protective circle of acquaintances that they’ve basically spent their whole lives around, anyway? Why is it so wrong to take your kids across town to beg for Snickers candy bars and candy corn? Why are you folks so afraid of letting your kids be afraid for just one afternoon?

I haven’t owned a TV set in about four years, so I don’t know if TBN and still show those old videos about how Halloween is a Satanic lure for children. I recall them quite vividly, because I had to watch pretty much all of them as a youngster. Apparently, Halloween is sort of a moral marijuana, the “gateway” to a lifetime of promiscuity and relativism and if you’re really unlucky, alignment with the Democratic Party. Since this is the Bible Belt, maybe such old school paranoia still plays a role in the local animus of Halloween—but if I had to venture a guess, I would say that it probably has something to do with good old fashioned elitism more than anything.

Golly, parents these days are insanely protective. If they don’t like what the schools are teaching, they home school them. If they don’t like what the community theater is playing, the boycott it. If they don’t like something they see on TV, that channel gets blocked out. The only time kids are allowed to be kids is when it’s conducive with mommy’s play date scheduling—these poor tykes only get to spend time with the kids within their community, so they never get to experience the cultures and worldviews of other children. The world for these kids is getting smaller and more insulated each day, and trunk or treating seems to be an attempt to compact the entire community into one acceptable stretch of asphalt for them.

From my perspective, that means the war on Halloween is really a war against something else: childhood individualism.

Just saying the name makes me want to gag. For those of you unfamiliar with the ritual, basically it’s a bunch of parents parking their cars in an empty lot and handing candy out to their communal offspring out of the trunk of their vehicles. Why? Because if little Johnny and Susie stray one second away from mommy and daddy, I suppose, they might just get abducted by leftist, atheist vegetarians that will teach them to hate the Bible and table manners.