Three Howls for Halloween
After kicking around within the temporal realm for sixty-two years, I now find that I regard Halloween as being the most enjoyable of all holidays. Christmas has been hugely degraded, thoroughly compromised by the ruthless forces of capitalist avarice and reduced to a shallow semblance of its former self, and other holidays no longer carry much weight, at least not in my mind. Only Halloween, with its ancient promise of harmless dread, remains as a dependable source of straightforward fun.
From the younger days of my distant childhood, to the older days of my current age, I have always looked forward to the arrival of autumn in general, with its bright foliage and bracing weather, and Halloween in particular. I have never been unduly prone to any form of superstition, but the supposedly haunted night of October 31, when legions of orange jack-o'-lanterns glow in the sinister dark, black cats prowl in shadowy corners, witches ride their broomsticks across the sky, and mischievous spirits are believed to be on the loose, holds a special appeal for me.
I grew up watching the horror films that had been produced at Universal Studios in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. When I viewed those films as a child, watching them on television in the early 1960s, I was grimly entertained by the bloodcurdling stories of Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man. Those black-and-white portrayals of terror, which caused me to have more than a few nightmares at the time, will always be linked with the annual experience of Halloween in my mind.
I have happy memories of dressing up as a scary character on Halloween evening, going from door to door through the streets of my neighborhood to solicit handouts of candy, shouting "Trick or treat!" and holding out a bag as each door was opened. My friends and I generally preferred to put together our own outfits for Halloween, using odd bits of clothing and dabs of makeup to create fanciful disguises for ourselves. I think it was probably more fun to be a child in those days, when children were allowed, and encouraged, to use their own imaginations, before every holiday on the calendar became a heavy-handed exercise in corporate marketing.
As the last day of October draws closer, I give three howls for Halloween! Nowadays, when news reports are continually filled with superficial descriptions of daily horrors, and open wrongdoing by leaders in the spheres of business and governance appears to be rampant, the make-believe creepiness of Halloween actually offers a brief escape into a more benign world. No ghost or goblin could ever be as frightful, or as dangerous, as the greedy vampires who deal in high finance or the corrupt monsters who currently serve as our leaders.
From the younger days of my distant childhood, to the older days of my current age, I have always looked forward to the arrival of autumn in general, with its bright foliage and bracing weather, and Halloween in particular. I have never been unduly prone to any form of superstition, but the supposedly haunted night of October 31, when legions of orange jack-o'-lanterns glow in the sinister dark, black cats prowl in shadowy corners, witches ride their broomsticks across the sky, and mischievous spirits are believed to be on the loose, holds a special appeal for me.
I grew up watching the horror films that had been produced at Universal Studios in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. When I viewed those films as a child, watching them on television in the early 1960s, I was grimly entertained by the bloodcurdling stories of Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man. Those black-and-white portrayals of terror, which caused me to have more than a few nightmares at the time, will always be linked with the annual experience of Halloween in my mind.
I have happy memories of dressing up as a scary character on Halloween evening, going from door to door through the streets of my neighborhood to solicit handouts of candy, shouting "Trick or treat!" and holding out a bag as each door was opened. My friends and I generally preferred to put together our own outfits for Halloween, using odd bits of clothing and dabs of makeup to create fanciful disguises for ourselves. I think it was probably more fun to be a child in those days, when children were allowed, and encouraged, to use their own imaginations, before every holiday on the calendar became a heavy-handed exercise in corporate marketing.
As the last day of October draws closer, I give three howls for Halloween! Nowadays, when news reports are continually filled with superficial descriptions of daily horrors, and open wrongdoing by leaders in the spheres of business and governance appears to be rampant, the make-believe creepiness of Halloween actually offers a brief escape into a more benign world. No ghost or goblin could ever be as frightful, or as dangerous, as the greedy vampires who deal in high finance or the corrupt monsters who currently serve as our leaders.