Unmasking Halloween
Among American holidays, Halloween is really the outlier. Holidays from Yom Kippur to Christmas to Ramadan grow from the traditions of major religions; Halloween is a pagan holiday in the loosest disguise. Even secular holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July are anchored by home and family; Halloween sends children out to knock on strangers' doors. Other holidays in the United States mark blessings and bounties, promises ranging from the coming of spring to the arrival of the new year; Halloween celebrates something darker, more anarchic, as the natural world dies, with the sweet rot of leaves in the air.
Other holidays promise gifts or feasts; on Halloween you ask for them — with a hint of actual menace behind the demand. After all, if you don't give a treat, you can expect some tricks. And let's not forget Devil's Night, which, for the relatively innocent children of suburban Detroit, was an opportunity to garland trees with toilet paper and egg the homes of perceived foes. (That was true, too, once upon a time, in the city itself, before arson became part of the trickster's arsenal and insurance fraud entered the picture.)
It's a strange holiday, one that turns children into roving gangs of monsters, out to do tricks or worse, and yet the whole community joins in to endorse it all. (For a look at just how anarchic it was a century ago, see the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis.)
There was always this subversive, somewhat threatening undercurrent to the holiday. But as Halloween has changed, perhaps some of it has gotten lost. Certainly, for people of a certain age, it's strange to look back on the evolution it has undergone over the last 30 years: going from marauding mobs of kids chasing a sugar high through the night to a rigidly chaperoned multibillion-dollar industry.
http://metrotimes.com/culture/unmasking-halloween-1.1392529