It’s that time again when fake cobwebs and rubber spiders decorate shop windows draped with orange and black crepe paper. Stores stockpile their supply of sweets with such oddities as candy corn and licorice lips.
Ordinary folks show up in pirate and vampire costumes, shouting “Avast!” or “Your neck looks yummy!”
Halloween. What a weird holiday.
When I was teaching in Seattle, I was always at a loss to explain this sacrosanct event to students from other countries. Some instructors showed up for class in full Halloween regalia, and once, in an attempt to get in the spirit of it, I added some fake cat whiskers to my everyday teacher attire.
But you try talking grammar with black bristles shooting out of your nostrils. Ever polite foreign students pretended not to notice but snuck side glances at each other, so before losing all credibility, I halted my riveting lesson on subject-verb agreement to explain this bizarre phenomenon.
I told them it’s a fun holiday for children, but they had already noticed that it was mostly the adults who were wildly cavorting. On our college campus, teachers roamed the halls as wicked witches and superheroes. In town, waitresses donned skimpy outfits, and supermarket clerks were zombies.
Even dogs were outfitted with a mask and cape. And the kids? They had on a plastic orange cover-up from Kmart.
Maybe it’s time to cancel this ditzy day. For years, I have been quietly making this subversive suggestion amid incredulous protests from friends and family, but officially going on record here probably cements my name on the FBI’s list of suspicious characters. After all, what is more American than this annual ruckus called Halloween?
But will someone please illuminate me on this goofy madness? We know that Veterans Day honors veterans, Presidents Day remembers presidents, Kamehameha Day celebrates Kamehameha, and Halloween … here I invite you to complete this sentence, since I cannot.
Perhaps I’m unable to get with this crazy carousing because I didn’t grow up with it. It was in the 1950s when the notion of Halloween started to seep onto our island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
My cousins and I were hearing about an American holiday where if we dressed funny, people would give us candy. We were eager to give it a try, but at a time when mothers sewed our clothes, who had money for frivolous costumes?
So we used rouge and lipstick to paint up our face, put on backwards a puka shirt, and teased our hair all boroboro but soon found out that not everyone was up to speed. A few times when we knocked on the door, we were greeted with, “How come you dress like dat … an wat, you like candy?”
That was the dawn of Halloween on my personal horizon in Hilo. Of course, when you’re a pre-teen, it’s also dawning on you that there are many ways to embarrass yourself, and how better to make ass than to paint your face orange, wear a tinfoil hat and growl menacingly.
By the time my children were growing up, trick-or-treating was in full swing. It put me in a quandary because there I was encouraging them to take candy from strangers on this one day and yet for the remaining 364, I warned them not to.
And under no circumstances were they to play any tricks unless they wanted to deal with the Wrath of Mom! But why did I ooh and aah over their plastic pumpkins overflowing with treats when for the rest of the year, I told them to never take more than they needed? What’s worse, they turned into howling little hoarders whenever I tried to sneak one measly caramel from their precious stash.
And looming over all of this were concerns about dental damage, but that was nothing compared to fears of deranged adults spiking chocolate bars and putting razor blades in apples!
I struggle to come to terms with this mayhem that goes against my good parenting skills and better judgment, but who can outrun the massive tsunami of orange and black multimedia messages rolling in every October?
Halloween. What a puzzlement.
Rochelle delaCruz was born in Hilo, graduated from Hilo High School, then left to go to college. After teaching for 30 years in Seattle, Wash., she retired and returned home to Hawaii. Rochelle welcomes your comments at rainysideview@gmail.com. Her column appears the second and fourth Monday of each month.