My street in the Upper West Side of New York City takes Halloween seriously. A week or more before the kids go trick-or-treating, our block features an abundance of ghoulishly carved pumpkins, life-sized plastic skeletons, and enough gauzy cobwebs to set the stage for a dozen Boris Karloff movies. My forays to the suburbs and exburbs also underscore that Halloween has become a major national holiday across the land. That’s a significant cultural change from the time when I was growing up, when the full extent of Halloween decoration was a grinning pumpkin on the doorstep, and the celebration was limited to one evening on pre-adolescents going door to door in bedsheets or other homemade costumes as the twilight descended.
Today, we entertain ourselves with much more elaborate manifestations of devilry. The well-degreed denizens who haunt the brownstones on my street know what truly terrifies the young folks. Here, for example, is a recumbent professor, desiccated due to too many long nights of study, luring the young with the promise of help with their SATs. The kinder roundabout has been warned to shun such treats, but can they help themselves? Do they realize that one taste may lead to an eternity of damnable indoctrination in Shoel of scholarship?
Fortunately, this fright will soon be over, and we can return to our ordinary worries over which political party can best wreck the country.
Picture by Peter Wood
