Boo!

The following essay is for those like me who are not Halloween fans.

I hate Halloween. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. I didn’t like it as a kid, although I went through the motions draped in one dumb costume or another, and I detest it as an adult. I’d rather open my front door to home invaders than trick-or-treaters. I have not seen nor will I see the movie Halloween or any of its 15 sequels.

What accounts for this hatred of All Hallows Eve? It’s harmless, right? Wrong. I never warmed up to monsters and goblins and ghouls as a youngster. I preferred them to remain within the confines of my imagination rather than walking around the neighborhood knocking on doors. Hell, Howdy Doody scared the shit out of me back then. Even in my early twenties when I went to see the movie Alien with some friends, my head stayed locked in the down position after that hideous creature did his Road Runner routine out of the guy’s stomach.

Then there’s the pumpkin, the carved pumpkin or jack-o’-lantern, to be precise. I hate that thing, particularly when it ain't smiling. I had this fear that, since my name was Jack, I’d wake up with a pumpkin head instead of the one I was born with. I had a hard enough time with the girls; how would I fare with a huge orange vegetable as a head?

I did a little research and discovered that the jack-o’-lantern’s origin goes back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard-drinking (surprise!) old farmer. One day he tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the tree trunk. Displeased, the devil placed a curse on me, I mean Jack, condemning him to forever wander the earth at night with the only light he had: a candle inside of a hollowed turnip. I hate turnips too.

The final problem I have with Halloween is mischief. You guessed it: I hate mischief, especially when it is perpetrated against my person or property. If Halloween is considered a holiday, normally meaning a day of celebration or reflection or commemoration, why should naughtiness, or worse, vandalism, be part and parcel of the occasion? I don't want to wake up and find pumpkins smashed on our front steps, 50 rolls of toilet paper strung on the branches of the maple tree in front, or the remnants of a dozen eggs dripping off our front windows. I've never awoken on Christmas or Easter morns and felt compelled to go outside and assess the damage from the prior night of hooliganism.

Fortunately for our neighborhood hooligans, my wife Joan is a Halloween lover, thus our house will be well lit tomorrow night, not the dark forbidding place it was when I lived there alone. She's got the treats all set to go, and the scary decorations outside, so welcome to all the local witches, zombies, mummies, skeletons, Palins and Plumbers. As for me? I’ll be curled up in some dark corner of the house, praying I don’t wake up the next morning with a pumpkin atop my shoulders.