Halloween, our most communal of holidays
On rituals, trick-or-treating, childhood mischief, and celebrating mortality
Halloween is a distinctly communal holiday. Whereas Christmas and Thanksgiving center around shared meals with family and friends, Halloween rituals encourage us to leave our houses and engage with our neighbors. Our neighbors respond by pumping our children with enough sugar to power a jet engine.
In honor of this most communal and caloric of holidays, we’re doing something a little different this week and sharing a few of our favorite, relevant Halloween reads. So, break off a piece of that Kit Kat, contemplate your mortality, and enjoy this newsletter that we probably should’ve sent two days ago.
On the importance of rituals
“Halloween rituals turn horror into play, death into levity, gore into laughter,” says Berkeley professor, Dacher Keltner. This article from the Greater Good Science Center explores how the rituals of Halloween–from trick-or-treating, to playfulling dressing up–provide a communal experience that help us get to know our neighbors. But has this ritual changed? Are kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhoods less?
On the changing nature of trick-or-treating
In her 2018 Atlantic piece, Julie Beck says no, kids are not trick-or-treating less, they are just trick-or-treating differently. What once involved door-to-door neighborly interactions is now moving to more contained spaces, like “trunk-or-treats” or Halloween events hosted at community centers. If this is true, why? Declining neighborly trust? Parents exerting more control over their kids?
On letting your kids get into mischief
Jessica Grose tackles the question of parental control over Halloween activities in her recent New York Times piece. She believes that parents–particularly the upper middle class reader of the Times–should let their kids run free on Halloween. They should trick-or-treat wherever they want and eat whatever candy they want. To Grose, Halloween should be a time for kids to “let their imaginations run wild” and connect with one another—with a lot less adult supervision.
On connecting with our own mortality
Modern life can feel disconnected in many ways–we can feel disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from the world around us. Writing in The Atlantic this week, Liz Bruenig also reminds us that we’ve become disconnected from death. She invites us to embrace Halloween, not just as an opportunity to dress up and trick-or-treat, but as a communal celebration to reconnect with our own finitude.