What Happened to Halloween?

I’m of the firm opinion that October is the best month of the year, and I don’t think it’s particularly close. The earth-toned hues of autumn cast the world in a magical aura that has captured the hearts of so many since time immemorial.

Living in New England in the autumn is a special privilege — I really don’t think there’s any place quite like it. The colors, the ambience, and the history (everything from Lovecraft to the Witch Trials) makes New England feel like the epicenter of autumn, and by extension, Halloween.

Halloween ruled as a kid, but looking around now, I think that my generation (late millennial/early gen Z, born in the last few years of the 1990’s) may have experienced the peak of the holiday.

Going around the neighborhood(s) and scheming to extract as much candy as possible with the young homies was an all-time experience — we’d hit hundreds of houses over the course of the night, raking in pounds and pounds of candy in the process.

I recently moved across the city of Boston from my old place. Both towns are residential areas, both with children and young families around. We received a total of 1 trick-or-treater at our last place over the course of several years. Literally just one kid.

Maddy and I are planning on having kids in the next few years, and seeing as we both consider Halloween to be our favorite holiday (I was a big Jack Skellington kid growing up), we are wondering if our future kids have missed the boat on a holiday that created so many great memories for us as we grew up.

We (perhaps, naively) thought that our new place, with a change of scenery and a single-family home with more families our own age might be a better bet for the spirit of the holiday… In a way it was, as we got 6 trick-or-treaters this year, which technically is an 1800% increase over our last place.

Still, 6 kids is a poor showing out, and it got me wondering about how universal my experience is, and also Halloween’s continued place in the cultural zeitgeist.

Is Halloween Dead?

My first plan of action for tackling this question was turning to you guys on Instagram. I received a lot of thoughtful replies, both indicating experiences mirroring my own, and about just as many saying this is the busiest year they’ve ever had. I opened it up to a poll and got largely the same result:

There seems to be a bit of a bifurcation happening: Many people got no trick-or-treaters at all, while others handed out 1000+ pieces of candy over the course of the night.

So one big takeaway is that there are now “host neighborhoods“ where all of the kids travel to. Kids and parents will drive to bigger, richer neighborhoods that are known for doing it up on Halloween and go about their trick-or-treating there.

There seems to be two reasons for this change:

The first and more obvious is that the host neighborhoods who are more passionate about Halloween are going to put in the extra effort to make it into an enjoyable block party, and will also be more likely to give out high-value candy (think full-sized candy bars and the like).

The second is concern for safety, a point that came up a bunch of times in the DMs I received on Instagram. I don’t think Halloween has ever been particularly unsafe, but the era of social media has induced a new vector for 1) fear mongering (razor blades in apples, pedos on every corner, etc.) and 2) social shaming young parents for not doing “enough“ (maybe one of the reasons birthrates are falling is that it seems absolutely exhausting to try and meet even the basic expectations for what is considered a good parent on the facebook/reddit mom groups…). Having a designated “safe street“ with lots of parental oversight ameliorates both of those concerns in one go, and the more parents around, the better.

Another consideration is that with the rise of trunk-or-treats, events where parents and their kids gather in parking lots and give out candy from the from the trunks of their cars (this seems a lot sketchier now that I’ve typed it out), kids are now trick-or-treating like 3 or 4 times throughout the course of the month, effectively making Halloween a month-long event. By the time we get to the actual date, the kids are sick of their new costume and already have 2 months worth of candy at home, deflating the gravity of the night itself.

But where does that leave the rest of us that want to contribute to making Halloween fun?

You put in effort to make your house spooky, but only your direct neighbors really see it. Then you take it all down on November 1st and move right along like it were just another week passing. Makes it feel like the juice isn’t exactly worth the squeeze.

I guess the big takeaway is that Halloween is becoming more exclusive in the sense that it’s for parents, children, and drunk college students. While this is a generally positive development for parents and kids, it does seem to really put a damper on the spirit of the season for most others. It feels like fewer and fewer houses will continue to put up decorations as the holiday becomes concentrated on the mega streets.

I also have to acknowledge that I’m in the demographic that has the least fun on Halloween, so I’m definitely feeling that a bit as well.

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Minutiae

Rowing Blazers/J.Crew/Paraboot

Had to get a quick Halloween fit pic off. I gotta say I love these Paraboots way more than I thought I would. They don’t work particularly well with this fit, but I’ve been vibing with them so much that I don’t really care.

Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but the J. Crew “classic fit“ that they’ve introduced over the last year or so is absolutely perfect. It seems to be a flagship product now, as the chinos almost never go on sale and the quality is notably higher than most of their other offerings.

Halloween was 76° this year

Gross and unbecoming for the fall season. These mini heat waves feel like they’re becoming more and more common unfortunately.

American Psycho remake

There is no movie that needs to be remade less than American Psycho. This is going to be awful.

The movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino, has been billed as “a whole new interpretation“ of the book, which only worked because of the time and the place it was satirizing. Modern finance bro culture just isn’t as interesting as 80’s investment banking. Not to mention that most of the plot is driven by mocking a yuppie WASP upper class that were all carbon copies of one another. This no longer exists in the current age (closest thing now is a Bushwick unemployed creative director with a trust fund, probably), and I don’t see them being able to make a compelling narrative that compensates for this.

Noah re-ups its partnership with Barbour

This was a pleasant surprise, as Noah had previously stated that their last collection with Barbour would be their last.

This partnership gave rise to my favorite coat (pictured below), a Bedale in a western tweed. They work really well together, and tend to choose really cool fabrics to play around with. This time around it looks like there’s some Bedales in washed cotton, casentino wool, in addition to another tweed jacket, this time in the longer Border model. It’ll be pricey but well-worth it.

More evidence that Instagram is cooked

Really not sure what to say about this. I guess instagram is trying to get out in front of the controversial AI girlfriend chatbots that are popping up. These chatbots were in the news recently after one allegedly encouraged a teenager to kill himself.

It seems like they’re letting people upload their own models, as I’m getting recommendations to chat with Diddy lol.

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