Autumn is my favorite season, but I could take or leave Halloween. (Aside from the treats, I mean.) There’s something about the way Americans celebrate this quasi-holiday that bothers me. (And I don’t mean the tricks.)
I think my disdain for it comes from the overindulgent-- if not decadent-- splurging on costumes alone. I don’t really mind allowing children to dress up as their favorite characters, but I’m less sanguine about the $1.2 billion spent last year on costumes – for adults! As long ago as 1997 Kurt Anderson wondered about our delayed maturity in a New Yorker article entitled “Kids Are Us.” One would have thought that we would have all grown up by now.
And don’t get me started on the $440 million spent on costumes for pets!
Even so, there’s something comforting about recalling authentic swatches of time-honored folklore. Hence, the following ditty, a mash-up of Gaelic and Teutonic motifs we like to call
Out of Our Gourds
To the front door’s truncated porch -–
the threshold Dutch folks call a “stoop” --
flock frights: electioneers, zealots,
at times a flaming bag of poop.
But when the sun starts slumping low,
naive minds twist to thoughts macabre,
reining nigh the tide of Samain
(unpronounceable, like Brett Favre.)
The Celts, we know, have a hard “k,”
along with the tale of Shaggy Jack.
He slyly slid from Hell’s cold grasp;
from Heaven came no welcome back.
So Jack and auld souls of his ilk
betwixt two realms are doomed to roam;
by chance upon one night a year
could land like moths on our safe home.
Unless deterred by wispy lights
hidden within the hollow shells
of finished products from nearby fields
gleaned before the last leaf fell.
Would that these fruits were made of wax:
rutabaga (that rock-hard swede),
turnip, mangelwurzel, pumpkin.
What knife? An ax is what we need.
To think such concrete flesh would deign
freely to yield itself to cuts
for carving out a gruesome face:
we’d have to be some kind of nuts.