The holidays of fall have changed since I was a child.
Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.
Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.
In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.
The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.
