Nows and Forevers

I don’t like Halloween.
This is not something I normally tell people. That’s because most everyone I encounter, children and adults alike, love Halloween. I know this from the hundreds of pieces of candy that gets distributed from my front door every Oct. 31. I know this when the costume stores open up in August. And I know this from all the Halloween-themed parties.
Even as a kid, I could pretty much care less about Halloween.
How do I know this? Because I have almost no memory of Halloween as a kid. Neither my parents or my grandparents ever put much, or any, emphasis on Halloween. I’m sure there was a holiday party or two at school, and I dressed up. But I don’t remember. And even though I have thousands of pictures when I was growing up, from my mother and my grandparents, there’s only one or two photos of me in what could be Halloween. And that’s from when I was three years old.
That’s it. No other photos. I have dozens, probably even hundreds, from Christmas and Thanksgivings and Easters.
That’s on both sides of my mismatched family. My father’s side was Boston Irish Catholic, and most decidedly not fun. They were not inclined to spend a lot of time on foolishness. My maternal grandparents were a lot of fun but also devout Methodists. They didn’t have much truck with Halloween either. My mom probably thought of Halloween as being one of the worst parts of parenthood. My sister, who came along 15 years later, also has few memories of Halloween, so Mom didn’t change later.
I don’t have many memories of trick-or-treating, either. My mom wasn’t a fan of having me take candy from strangers, long before there were ever any concerns about it. She didn’t like it on principle. And to be honest, she didn’t like having candy around the house, either. I know my it sounds like my mother was a Puritan. She wasn’t. But after having kids of my own, I see where she was coming from.
I have two memories of trick-or-treating, both in the ’70s in Connecticut. My first 10 years or so was spent in an older, middle-class neighborhood with closely spaced houses. Some were nice. Some weren’t. Even now, 45 years later, the neighborhood hasn’t changed and the houses, many there in the early 1900s, haven’t been improved in the early 2000s, either.
This one time I remember, maybe 1977 or 1978, my mother reluctantly took me trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. I don’t remember the costume, I don’t remember the candy. All I remember is the orange UNICEF box that we got at school — and at church — and I was more focused on making sure I got coins for box. We didn’t go more than a few blocks and was back, but I got some money to donate.
I remember one Halloween costume, a Red Sox uniform my aunt knit for me at age 2 or so. I still have it in a box somewhere.
The last time I went out for Halloween was 1979. My parents split earlier that year and Mom and I moved to a small apartment in the big city, in a somewhat dicey neighborhood. I just turned 12 and I needed, I think, something that reminded me of good times. I fixated on Halloween. I was going to Catholic school at the time — the local school was rough and tumble — and they considered Halloween a sin. So I asked my mother if I could go out on Halloween.
For reasons I don’t understand, she agreed. And I don’t know why, but she sent me out on my own. I wouldn’t do that now, and my mother was always a very careful parent who wouldn’t leave me on my own. But she did that night. A kid from the suburbs, I didn’t belong in trick-or-treating where I lived. It wasn’t necessarily dangerous. But we didn’t spend a lot of time out when it was dark.
I survived. I walked around with a friend and his parent who took pity on me. I went out a few blocks and then went back home.
And never thought about Halloween again from 1989 to 2006. I avoided Halloween parties and never had a reason to do anything other than buy and hand out candy at my front door between then and now. And gradually I discovered I disapproved of the whole concept.
It wasn’t until my daughter was born that I had to go back to Halloween. Her mother wouldn’t have it any other way, nor would her grandmother. We went out my daughter’s first Halloween, going door to door in our Queens neighborhood with a stroller and an unhappy girl dressed as a pumpkin. Her third Halloween she would walk up to the door and say, “trick or treat.” That was, I admit, fun. And in the nearly two decades since, I’ve watched my kids dress up, go trick-or-treating, and dump all the candy on the living room floor afterward.
I still don’t like Halloween. But they like it, and that’s enough for me to enjoy it through their eyes.