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Halloween may be the most American of all holidays, and not just because too much candy can lead to diabetes. Rituals are central to establishing unity within a group, whether it is religious rituals surrounding birth, adolescence, marriage, and death; institutional rituals like the singing of the alma mater and the wearing of Medieval robes for graduation; or cultural rituals like the food and football at Thanksgiving or the noisemakers on New Years. The nature of the Halloween ritual as it has evolved in the United States over the last century is both fun and fascinating because it is reflective of the tension between the two core values of the society: unity and individualism.
United We Stand, Divided We Also Stand
As a nation born of the European Enlightenment, the heart of the philosophical foundation of the country’s culture is individuality. The thinkers who influenced the American Founding Fathers contended that the essence of humanity is rationality. We are all shaped in God’s image and God has a will, they argued, so we too, then, possess our own minds which are capable of logical thought. A collection of rational beings will then, on average, assess a set of facts and come up with a maximally reasonable conclusion. Thus, deliberative democracy is our means of selecting those who wield political power, trial by jury determines when a law was violated, and free-market capitalism determines the flow of money.
In this way, we can trust the individual to know what is right for them. We do not depend on the structure for our continuance, we do not place a king above the rest of the citizenry, and we are all equal under the law. We have adopted the lone cowboy on the plains, surviving by his wits, grit, and knowledge of the land to survive.
But at the same time, whether it is at the Olympics or a presidential campaign event, we love to collectively chant “USA! USA!” We raise foam fingers high in the air to show that we are #1. There is a deep sense of nationalism that occasionally expresses itself as American exceptionalism. There is, for Americans, a special pride concerning America. We are both one, yet many.
Boo!
It is in this context that we need to understand the special place Halloween has come to occupy. The day is nominally a celebration of All Hallow’s Eve, the day before the Catholic All Saints Day, a curious period when the veil between the world of the living and the realm of the dead becomes temporarily permeable. It is a time of haunting from the great beyond and therefore a period that those of us with material form should be frightened of our possible interaction with those who no longer walk amongst us.
This is why we associate Halloween with evil, torture, and death. All month we have marathons of scary movies on television featuring psychotic humans with chainsaws, demons who inhabit the bodies of children, and supernatural entities like witches, ghosts, and goblins. It is hardly accidental that a franchise of horror films simply goes by the title “Halloween.”
Life is uncertain. Bad things happen to everyone. Death meets us all and not always when we think it will. Four percent of the human population is comprised of sociopaths, so manipulation and crime will never be eliminated from society no matter how much we try.
We live lives that involve all sorts of dark fears and we use Halloween as an occasion to put the grotesque and frightening front and center to both honor our phobias and concerns. The hope is that by presenting them explicitly before ourselves and coming together in recognition of them, we might be able to purge ourselves of some of the harm that comes from living in fear.
More Treat, Less Trick
This is why, traditionally, Halloween was a time for practical jokes, for egging and toilet papering houses, setting bags of flaming dog poop on porches, and all other sorts of pranks. By becoming the shadowy figures that bring the harm, we switch sides with what we are afraid of and assert ourselves on the world. But this is America, we’ll give our victim the opportunity to pay us off, to give us something of value in exchange for not having to suffer the indignity of the trick. So, we shake down our neighbors by giving them the ultimatum “trick or treat.” Nice house you got there, be a real shame if something happened to it because you didn’t have a spare Snickers bar—if you know what I mean.
On the one hand, this led the way to transforming Halloween from honoring the otherworld to reveling in the material. Halloween has become a sort of hedonistic bacchanalia: kids hopped up on ungodly amounts of cheap chocolate and adults dressed as sexy cats, sexy nurses, and even sexy M&M’s. But there is a deeper side to it, too.
Ceremonial costumes, masks in battle, and masquerade balls are storied traditions tracing back before recorded history. We have long known of the power of going into public with our identities obscured. But the American transformation of Halloween takes wearing a costume to a new and contextually different place. Yes, there are popular costumes each season, but the real fun of participating is coming up with your own idea. The best costumes are clever, playful, or unexpected.
When they were young, Steve sent his kids out to the annual Halloween parade with his daughter in a superhero’s sparkly red and blue outfit with boots, a gold crown, and gold bracelets; while his son wore a long white plastic bag with large red, blue, and yellow dots all over it. She was Wonder Woman and he was Wonder Bread. As a kid, Stephen and some of his buddies dressed as commandos, would have one knock on the door and say, “Trick-or-treat,” and when the homeowner’s bowl of chocolates emerged, so did the other four from the bushes and around the corner. In grad school, Steve’s cohort held an annual party where the expectation was a philosophical costume. One arrived as Hume’s problem of induction (a tuxedo with a hula hoop—formal circularity) and another as Buridan’s Ass (don’t ask). The challenge in being a part of it was to be clever, to think of something no one else would.
To be American is to be a part of the whole, to participate in the cultural rituals that bond us together. Dressing up for Halloween is one of them. But unlike Thanksgiving in which every table has a turkey, dressing, and gravy, and Christmas where each house has a tree with lights, on Halloween to conform is to express your individuality. Our money—and what is more American than money?—displays the motto “E pluribus unum,” that is, from many, one. We are a whole, but our thoroughgoing commitment to individualism pushes against that. It is in coming up with our Halloween costume, in employing the Yankee ingenuity that lays at the core of our essence, that we are fully American. So, when you open up the door, bowl of fun-sized treats in hand, and ask “So, what are you?” what you are doing is firmly sewing the seams of the culture, weaving in the next generation into the quilt of America...which would itself be an amazing costume.
There is Mexico's Day of the Dead. There were Masked Balls back in history. Etc. Perhaps dressing up as our enemies--spiritual or otherwise--may be universal and Halloween is the USA version of that. It's fun to don a little bit of Evil but not BE Evil. That helps overcome the Puritan character of our Founders, a strain of religious intensity that still pervades our country. We can make fun but no harm, no foul.