Reality needs to take the day off

It was the 1940s, and my husband was just a small boy, but to this day he can remember almost every detail of that one Halloween night. The doorbell rang. He opened the door. The Harvey boys, neighborhood ruffians, had tied a rope around the neck of a quart-sized milk bottle.

The milk bottle, thrown from the door, skidded across the hardwood floor and landed at the feet of my husband’s stern father. The Harvey boys expected candy to be placed in that milk bottle. Instead, they heard the father’s roar of disapproval and retreated. Later they returned to soap the home’s front windows.

My Halloween stories are not so dramatic. I remember how Halloween smelled, that mix of crisp autumn nights and mildewy leaves. I remember how we wandered the streets for hours without adult supervision. I remember how Halloween provided a break from our childhood routine.

So I am always disappointed when I hear about attacks on the Halloween tradition. First, the safety police fretted, all those razor blades in the apples! Well, those razor blades turned out to be more urban legend than suburban reality.

Then a minority of Christian fundamentalists turned their focus to Halloween, fearful of dark-force undertones. And last week they were joined by some odd “grave fellows” – the Wiccans. Puyallup School District officials canceled Halloween costume parties for children, in part because some Wiccan parents said that ugly witch costumes offended them.

Boo.

We need Halloween more than ever. It’s been such a dang serious year. The war in Iraq. Threats by terrorists, the real-life goblins. And now an election season that seems to be overstaying its welcome.

Unless a society can play, imagine, suspend rules and have some fun, it’s headed for insanity. Shakespeare knew this. Some of his plays feature what literary types call the Green World, a space outside conventional society where paupers play kings and kings pass for peasants. A place where strange events unfold. When the characters return to real life, all is different, but in a good way.

Halloween’s roots are traced to Samhain, a Celtic tradition. According to World Book Encyclopedia, Samhain was a “magical time of transition when barriers between the natural world and supernatural were broken.”

Popular-culture researchers have been tracking the growing popularity of Halloween among adults. This year, the National Retail Federation says adults will spend $3.12 billion on Halloween accouterments. I’m not surprised.

Our world grows more and more literal by the day. Reality shows rule on TV. Documentaries win film awards. Pundits discuss world events 24 hours a day on cable.

These are not bad trends necessarily, but I worry we are forgetting how to imagine. We are forgetting that there is much of life we don’t understand. It’s that mystery, that “Unknown X” – as both the mathematicians and the theologians call it – that isn’t getting as much air time anymore.

Halloween allows for it.

When children choose costumes, they are opening up to their parents about the reality of their interior lives. When adults choose costumes, they are opening up to the adults around them about the persons hiding within.

Every holiday contains some risk. The most benign of all holidays, Thanksgiving, is often fraught with family tensions or food mishaps. One year, for instance, my sister Lucia took a baked eggplant dish out of the oven and placed it on the stove, not realizing a burner was still on. The glass pan exploded, sending glass shards into the turkey and stuffing. Talk about your Unknown X.

So let us relax about Halloween, please. We can regulate and sanitize and worry our culture into blandness and its citizens into failures of imagination. But life will never be predictable or under our control.

There are always Harvey boys waiting to come out of the Green World and into our home. We can learn a lot by letting them in.