Happy Halloween

I like Halloween. When I was a lad of 3 or 4 or 5, we lived in an ethnic, largely Catholic neighborhood in Cleveland, and folks went all out decorating their homes and yards for Halloween. I dressed as one of those cartoon crows, Heckel or Jeckel, and scored a huge haul of goodies and even some real money. Those were some of the most fun times of my life.

We moved back to rural Georgia when I was 6, and Halloween was nowhere near as big a deal as it had been in Cleveland. Beyond jack'o'lanterns, nobody bothered to decorate much. It was also too dark and dangerous to walk down sparsely populated country roads to trick or treat, so we had to be driven to various Halloween friendly homes in the valley and to parties. Some of our neighbors saw Halloween as a manifestation of the occult and the work of the devil, so we didn't call on them to get treats. Frankly, the rural, white, Protestant Halloween was not nearly as much fun as the urban, ethnic, Catholic Halloween.

I had the pleasure of living in neighborhoods that were quite enthusiastic for Halloween. In 1987, we moved to a neighborhood in Rockville, Maryland that was just starting to yuppify after a metro station had opened nearby. Most of our neighbors decorated for the holiday, and there were scores of trick or treaters at our front door.

In 1998, we moved to a dense working class neighborhood in Yonkers where most of our neighbors were Catholic. When Halloween 1999 approached, most of the households decorated their front entrances and yards starting a few weeks ahead of time. Quite a few went whole hog and featured elaborate displays taking up their entire front yards or stoops. As many as 200 children would call on us. One year, we had some of our nephews for the holiday, and we had to give out some of the candy they had scored because we had run out.

Now I live in the country again, and I don't expect any trick or treaters. It's too dark and dangerous, and the houses are too far apart for kids to get the kind of booty that makes for a memorable Halloween without putting in way too much effort. I'll pick up some candy just in case.

The fun/boring Halloween dichotomy is not merely a function of urban/rural differences. We have lived in urban and susburban communities that had pretty lame and halfhearted levels of Halloween participation. I have identified some correlates with high neighborhood enthusiasm for Halloween:

1. Relatively high population density.
2. Presence of street lighting.
3. Lots of lawn ornaments such as "Bathtub Virgin Marys", St Francis statues, little Dutch kids by windmills, donkeys pulling a cart full of plastic flowers, lawn jockeys, flamingos, etc.
4. A relatively high proportion of Roman Catholics.
5. A relatively high proportion of immigrants or descendants of immigrants who arrived after 1890.
6. Presence of sidewalks.