Fall Classic

Wait!

Before you Red Sox haters click away, the title of this post does not refer to last night’s World Series victory.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m deliriously happy that the curse has finally been reversed. And I’m doubly glad that the post-season victories came against two of the old, ‘classic’ baseball clubs… teams with well-established baseball traditions and fanatically loyal fans. It made the long-overdue win seem that much more ‘right’… legitimate, even.

However, I’m using the term ‘Fall Classic’ here in reference to Halloween.

I know I’m probably going to get a bunch of comments from religious folks who consider Halloween at best a secular holiday, and at worst, a ‘pagen’ rite.

Personally, I grew up trick-or-treating, and loved every minute of it. My costumes were usually rather last minute affairs (except for the robot and mummy costumes my parents made for me in 2nd and 3rd grade), but the nippy fall air and elaborately decorated neighborhood houses made the whole affair magical.

OK, the candy was pretty cool, too.

But by the time I started Jr. high School, something about Halloween had started to change… and not for the better. It wasn’t just my becoming more sophisticated / jaded (although I’m sure that was responsible for part of the change). I started to notice that many of the social ills of the ‘real world’ were starting to encroach on Halloween’s good clean fun.

More and more parents accompanied their children on the trick-or-treat rounds, and nearly every parent insisted on carefully inspecting the candy bag at the end of the night to make sure nothing had been tampered with. Today, this kind of thing is a given, but for people who grew up in a more innocent age, it is truly sad to see the extent to which kids have lost their autonomy.

Now, strictly speaking, Halloween is not enshrined in the pantheon of Jewish holidays. But most non-orthodox Jews I know in the U.S. have fully incorporated it into their internal calendar between Sukkot and Thanksgiving. The more orthodox crowd tends to largely ignore Halloween, and is sometimes openly antagonistic to it (those are the folks who turn off the porch light and pretend not to be home!).

Even though my departure from my parent’s house coincided with my drift towards the more orthodox end of the religious spectrum, I never lost my fondness for Halloween. Wherever I was living, I always made sure to have candy in the house on the 31st to give out to the neighborhood ghosts and witches.

However, once our kids came along, I had to finally confront the conflict between belief and practice. I was torn, because I really didn’t want to keep my kids from doing something I remembered with such fondness. But, at the same time, Zahava and I were taking great pains to indoctrinate them with the value of a different set of holidays… many of which had been ignored or glossed over in my own upbringing.

It turns out that the solution sort of presented itself. You see, long before our kids were even aware of Halloween, they were already deeply smitten with the holiday of Purim (Judaism’s springtime costume holiday). Unlike Halloween, which was a taking holiday, Purim entails going to the houses of one’s friends and neighbors and giving baskets of food and candy. So by the time Ari and Gili learned about Halloween, there was less allure to dressing up and asking for treats. On the contrary, both kids were quite content with being able to answer the door and give out candy to the kids (always with an adult) who rang the bell. It didn’t hurt that part of giving out the candy included extensive ‘product testing’ to make sure that we weren’t giving out sub-standard treats!

Now that we live in Israel, the distance has muted Halloween’s siren song. In fact, without the associated store decorations, I’d be floored if either of the big kids were even aware of its approach.

And part of me… the part that clearly remembers cheeks and ears tingling from the late October night air as I ran from house to house filling my pillowcase… is sad that my children will grow up blissfully unaware of this special bit of Americana.

I’m wondering though… based on the trend I detected 30+ years ago towards Halloween’s loss of innocence… does this 'Fall Classic' even exist anymore as I knew it ?