It was five years ago, riding back on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River from Ashland, Kentucky, that I noticed it. We had been at the dedication of a memorial to Jack Kerouac at the Paramount Theatre there. What was stunning about the trip home was the festoonery. Every house, it seemed, had some elaborate Halloween decoration. Even fairly woebegone trailers could be counted on to have out front a 20-foot-high Frankenstein’s monster, well lit and kept inflated by a powerful fan.
“Hillbilly Christmas,” remarked Jimmy, one of my traveling companions.
I don’t remember such elaborate displays from years ago, but it was nice, then and now, to note the vigor with which Halloween is celebrated in this part of the country. While the nearby town has its own special festivity, I’ve noticed that All Hallow’s Eve generally gets more attention around here, maybe in the interior of the country in general, than it does elsewhere. And it causes me to think back, consider how the holiday has changed even during my lifetime.
The place I grew up, when I was growing up there, very much resembled the place I live now. There was a college town that anchored the place, with lots of rural surroundings, farmland, small communities, and neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods, everyone knew each other and each other’s children, and in that one found safety — the front yard seemed to extend for a mile or two in every direction. Though it was never stated, we all felt that our own neighborhood was the best around, the best possible.
We would have various neighborhood holiday celebrations, at Christmas and Labor Day and sometimes the Fourth of July, but by far the best was Halloween.
A neighbor, Carl Hunt, had a big tractor and a flatbed trailer, and at an agreed-upon time all the costumed neighborhood children would assemble at the Hunts’ house. We would climb aboard the trailer, and off we’d go, hayride-fashion, from house to house.
Some of the neighbors were unwelcoming of several dozen children; they knew to keep their porch lights off. Where the lights were on, Mr. Hunt would stop the tractor, and off we’d jump, dashing to the door to get first pick of the proffered goodies. On our return, there would be jockeying for position to have the advantage at the next stop.
Around the neighborhood we went. One particularly memorable year my grandparents, both in their mid-80s, had replaced their porch and living room light bulbs with eerily colored ones — something distinctly unlike them. And they wore masks! Hideous, witch-like masks! My respect for them grew.
After the invasion by children, each neighbor would turn off the porch light, get in the car, and drive the couple of miles to the home of the Gregorys, who lived in a nice home next to a creek at the bottom of a long, curving hill on a dirt road. After the raiding had been completed, so would Mr. Hunt’s tractor and trailer bearing us. There we would find that the grownups had built a roaring bonfire, and there were tables filled with food everyone had brought: hot dogs to be roasted over the fire (the event was not called a bonfire, but a “wiener roast”), potato salad, coleslaw, cookies and cakes of all sorts (as if the evening’s sugar quotient had not already been far exceeded by Halloween candy), and the ubiquitous twin Jell-o atrocities: orange Jell-o with cottage cheese folded in and green lime Jell-o shot through with slivers of carrot. I have always succeeded in avoiding these and with luck shall make it to ripe old age without knowing their taste.
Of course, marshmallows got toasted over the fire by every child. They were the Halloween equivalent of the Fourth of July’s sparklers.
It was always a wonderful time, and as I think back on it the memory is tempered with some sadness. Twisted individuals hadn’t yet thought to put needles and razor blades and poison into Halloween treats (though in our neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone, this would never have been likely). Nor had personal injury lawyers burgeoned into the ghoulish industry they are today, such that it would be very foolish for a modern Mr. Hunt to carry kids around in the dark on a high trailer, at least not without the parents signing a multi-page hold-harmless document relieving him of liability should one skin a knee or something.
It’s too bad.
Because perhaps more than any other holiday, Halloween used to give children a sense of neighborhood, of community. Out in the country, in areas where there was no Mr. Hunt, parents would usually accompany their kids — the distances were too great to travel on foot, and country roads are trouble at night on a bicycle — so the parents would chat with the grownups at each stop (while, of course, maintaining the fiction that in their costumes the children could not be recognized).
Not all change, I guess, is progress.