Where Did Halloween Go?

Is the Loss of Halloween the Pandemic’s Fault?

A lot of people are talking about how the pandemic may essentially cancel Halloween this year. Admittingly, I even wrote a post about it, saying as much too. Recently, I started to really think about it and realized that even before the pandemic happened, Halloween was starting to vanish.

Even in the small town I live in, kids haven’t gone trick or treating in neighborhoods for the last several years. In recent years, they would walk around the town square to collect candy from some of the local businesses, but never step foot around the neighborhoods. Even in the neighborhoods that were usually full of children, there was never even one single trick or treater to be seen on Halloween night.

All That We’ve Lost

The vanishing of this holiday is a loss for everyone. Sadly, as a nation, we just watched it go. We didn’t loudly object, we didn’t try to hold on to it, we barely even noticed it had gone forever. Firstly, it is a loss for the kids of today. Someone told me that the kids don’t mind, because they still get the candy. Truth is, that’s only because you can’t miss what you never had or knew. The kids today don’t know how it felt to get dressed up and walk around the neighborhood. They don’t know what real trick or treating is. They lost the feeling, the excitement, the social event that it all once was. They lost it and for many, they never even had the chance to know it.

It is an unfair loss for those who are old enough to remember the trick or treating we all used to do, but are now robbed of the chance to be the adults who get to pass out candy and enjoy the excitement of the costumes and the knock at the door, knowing you get to see the smiles of children. In a way, it is almost as though some of us lost a part of what should have been our adulthood. Kids have lost a part of their childhood, as we were robbed of an element of our adulthood.

Neighborhoods share in this loss as well. Trick or treating in the past was a way for neighborhoods to get to know one another better. It was a way to celebrate as a neighborhood and to look out of your window to watch all the excitement. It gave your neighborhood a feeling of life, and almost a pulse of its own. Now, that pulse has stopped, or at the very least, slowed to an eerie whisper.

Even the creativity that used to swirl around people and places, is now diminished or lost. People would decorate their houses, businesses, and create haunted houses in the middle of even the most remote neighborhoods. Now, with nobody going around in the neighborhood, what’s the point? Right, there is no point. So, these things too have all but vanished.

Closing Thoughts

Never as children did, we think that Halloween would become so much like the ghosts that are a part of its tradition. Never did those innocent kids that we all once were, ever think that this holiday would be stripped from our neighborhoods and moved to other locations. In some places, it was even erased, rather than moved.

What was once an exciting, creative, and fun holiday, has now been reduced to just a time of year that stores sell more candy and fewer decorations fly off the shelves. With neighborhoods silent on Halloween and no families walking around, even the candy that still is found on shelves… stays there. No one to give it away to, really. So, fewer people even bother to buy candy in large bags. Just enough for your family and a week or so eating it. After that, it’s back to the same as before. Where did Halloween go? I miss it. Do you?