The Melting of My Hard Halloween Heart

My cheeks occasionally felt sore from the indulgent length of my grin. “Happy Halloween!” I was shouting at the strangers on their stoops after they would give candy to my children (and the others in our tribal gang). “Happy Halloween!” they’d wave back, and I would grin some more. I knew I was being a little goofy but didn’t really care. There was something infectious about the whole thing; it was getting to me, and I was letting it.

The light was getting a little dramatic as October’s last sunset gave way to October’s last twilight, a dozen shades of cool cascading pastels I could not name making themselves known above and around us. Our group was stacked, the kind of companions you want and need about yourself for a journey - and on a night - such as this. Among our ranks: a mermaid queen, Black Panther, a killer whale, Link, a red-hooded heroic figure, and a ghost bride. We five adults, their escorts, were uncostumed (I did have a wizard hat on, but as Wizard of Monadnock it’s debatable whether or not this counts as a costume). Peripheral to our group - coming and going according to his apparent whims - was a very formidable six-foot plague doctor all in black, complete with a leather plague beak.

The semi-transmogrified children - as I like to imagine children have done from time immemorial - ran gleefully, shrieking and hurried, from door to door. Their aspiring efficiency was limited only by the bottlenecks inevitably caused by having to wait for someone to answer the door and physically give them the candy, which on this night seemed their birthright.

Especially after a Year Without Halloween.

Serving in our capacity as escorts, it wasn’t necessary for us to venture beyond the edges, where the streets met the yards, but when the kids were done and had already plunged ahead toward the next treasure, that’s when I would grin wide and wave and yell my “Happy Halloween!”s. Each time, I think it brought me more warmth and joy than the last. It was like a feedback loop. Naturally, the mild temperatures and that increasingly expressive sky helped matters, but it was more than that, the whole thing. I had to admit it: maybe Halloween isn’t so bad after all.

For most people, of course, this is their default position, something that not only would be difficult to admit but is so obvious that it hardly bears saying aloud - but not so for me. According to some, I may not merely be the Wizard of Monadnock but may also serve as the Grinch of Halloween. So what had happened to me? What had caused my cold autumn heart to grow six times bigger (or whatever) like that of the famous Cartoon Terrorist of Whoville from the old Christmas special?

*

I know I’m a drag in this area and I’m sorry - I’ve always been like this. As far back as I can remember, the whole costume thing felt like a chore, a hoop I had to jump through in order to earn a fortune in free candy from my neighbors. I loved that part, of course. I loved the trick or treating itself. But once I hit the point where I was too old to get away with trick or treating - surely you all remember what it was like - I was kind of done with it all. I had no issue with the idea of parties, but I sure as hell wasn’t gonna dress up for them.

I love holidays and tend to get really into them and I swear to god most of the year I’m a fun guy, but this is just a longstanding weakness. Even in college, all the ubiquitous “sexy” costumes failed to win me over. I can’t even explain why, but I found the sexy costumes obnoxious instead of alluring; obviously, the issue is definitely on my end, here.

It might just be that I tend to get grumpy this time of year, like clockwork, in general. It’s no secret that I’m a creature of the summer sun and now is the time when my last remaining tan is fading and my mediterranean skin and organs begin to shrivel up from the artificial heat everywhere. I don’t fault people for assuming that I hate the fall altogether, even if this isn’t quite accurate. As a good buddy who’s known me a long time put it earlier this year, “You don’t hate the fall. You hate what the fall represents.” And it’s true. I actually like the cooler weather, and (don’t tell anybody) but for like two months - say, up until the new year - I kind of welcome the early sundowns. The leaves are pretty. It’s contemplative, as Michael Scott once said. I dig that.

But fall also represents decline and lost tan lines and shriveled up organs. Most of all, it represents the approach of death, and while I don’t honestly believe death is something to fear, I don’t think it’s something to welcome or relish, either. So many all around us try to weave this weird tale about how we need a season of inactivity and cozy blankets and hibernation, which only makes me nuttier. Humans don’t hibernate, nor do any primates, nor do the vast, vast majority of mammals, not to mention solid majorities of all the other types of animals and all the other creatures and archaea in the kingdoms of life. You know what’s a great hibernator? Ticks. Fleas, too. Is that what you want to be like? I don’t think so. People think hygge is innocent, but follow it to its conclusions and tell me what you find.

*
Anyway, just as I’m not lacking in weaknesses and eccentricities, I’m not lacking in virtues, either. I act the bastard often enough, but I still recognize that people like this time of year and that people of all ages get a hell of a kick out of Halloween. I’d never take that away from children, but in my grizzled, nearly middle-age wisdom I no longer want to stand in the way of anyone’s Samhain fun. And though I have not particularly relished anything about this autumn (if we’re being honest, even the leaves were pretty mediocre - not the worst, but we’ve all seen better), it seemed important this year to just suck it up, set aside my prejudices, and lean into the season whether I truly like it or not.

Part of it was definitely a sense that everybody deserved a real, legit good Halloween after last year’s catastrophic cancelation. The rest, I guess, lies in the simple fact that usually in life it’s more about how you choose to respond to the adverse times than it is about what those times impose on you against your will.

Stopping short, of course, of donning an actual costume myself, I nonetheless allowed the spirit of the season to flow uninhibited into all the areas of my life. Here at GoMonadnock, we put together a rich Halloween guide and, along with Monadnock Underground, observed a full bore Halloween Week. For Halloween Weekend, the calendar was stacked - a pre-Halloween bash at our house Friday night; the Halloween Extravaganza at the Hancock Depot - for which we wrote and performed a delightful two-part skit - on Saturday night; and, of course, the trick or treating itself on Sunday night, something I assumed would for me be but a coda to the weekend’s real activities.

Interesting approach to a holiday I don’t like, right? Did it work? Sure, it did. The party at our house was an absolute blast and featured the appearance of both new faces and very much long-missed ones. The downside was how much of a blast it was, for all the children were up far too late and were in no shape for a second late night party on Saturday. This made enjoyment of the bands and the ecstasy of performance a little tricky - but we did our best. When it comes to epic times with children, sometimes you just have to let your ambition run free; aim impossibly high and if you only get 60% of what you were shooting for, it’s usually still pretty incredible.

When I got up on Sunday morning (a little tired myself at this point), I felt sure I had fulfilled my obligations to Halloween - had, in fact, gone far above and beyond what might reasonably be expected from such a Grinch as I! Though I would, of course, go through the motions of the trick or treat ritual that evening, I more or less considered the whole thing over for me.

But so often in life, the flashes of joy and connection and meaning and fullness that really move us when we aren’t expecting it, the ones that catch us by surprise, are the brightest and the starkest ones. And as I make it a point to never be taken by surprise, when something gets me - like a specter bursting from the darkening forests between the houses - its impact is all the greater.

*

And this, again, I was not expecting.

I see my friends often; I enjoy their company very much. That we had gathered together with our intermingled offspring for an event such as this (or even just any old Friday night) has never been unusual even in these troubled times. I was, as ever, joyed to be with them, but it’s fair to say that this in and of itself might not have been enough to melt and then grow my hardened Halloween heart.

Certainly, there was a bit of a confluence of disparate elements of good fortune: the weather and the sky, as I mentioned before, didn’t hurt. Whatever demons had plagued the (my) children the night before had seemingly fled, and they were filled with good nature and good cheer (for the most part), which in turn enhanced the fact that we adults, for our part, also seemed to be naturally riding some positive waves. But these things, too, are things I try to facilitate as often as possible, not sneaky impish lessons capable of startling me on All Hallow’s Eve.

What got me was something bigger - bigger than the UN-recognized right of children to trick or treat, bigger than just our kids, bigger than me, bigger than us as a group. It’s amazing how it’s possible to forget what it’s like to just be out there in the street with people everywhere on a special day, especially a special day that isn’t in the summertime, and it’s something I didn’t know I had forgotten about until there it was all around me. People everywhere. Little, big, most in costumes, many not, but nearly all wearing smiles, all willing to greet other passing groups with more smiles and Happy Halloweens, strangers and acquaintances alike. And other people, the denizens of this little ersatz Germanic village of a neighborhood, venturing out onto their porches to greet us and fete us, to give unto us without the slightest reservations about the fact that practically nobody looting this neighborhood for candy actually lived in it. For the first time in what felt like an awfully long time, everyone in this uncoordinated, moving, disconnected throng shared a tacit, unspoken, simple, but very real agreement, and everyone in the throng was playing their role in the shared agreement - and in this brief moment of almost wholly arbitrary agreement, through this agreement, we were happy. Happy together, collectively, and connected as such, and warmed by that connection, and through these waves and loops and forms we are, for a moment, engaging in life as we are meant to.

This is, of course, what holidays - all holidays - are for, but we so rarely get it so right, especially now.

It caught me off guard, but I did see it quickly, and when I grinned and shouted my holiday harks, I meant them. There really was a happiness that descended on us all like a cloud this year for Halloween.

I didn’t make a big thing out of it, of course; it’s not like I went around stealing all the Halloween cheer (and candy) from every home a la the “real” Grinch, nor had I really committed any seriously Grinchy offenses of any kind, so I didn’t have much to atone for. But when we left the imaginary German village and parked the cars at the elementary school to make our way through the elaborate and eerie ghost-cabaret you find each year on High Street, as we made our way down the hill of the school’s driveway, I couldn’t help but feel a little like the repentant anti-social green man descending from his mean mountain, abandoning his own negative nature in order to commune with the purer-hearted people of Whoville.

I don’t mean to get carried away, here - for one thing, at the moment, I’m probably the last person you can expect to be calling the fair citizens of Peterborough pure of heart. But just then, seeing the silhouettes of my dear companions ahead of me against a backdrop of tall bare trees that seemed painted there against a sky that had morphed from the calmer pastel watercolors of the previous hour to a more magical pairing of brilliant gold with deep, dark blue, I set all those reservations aside and offered the best of my love to everyone here, and to this place itself.

They say that Halloween and the surrounding days are when the “veil” between worlds is thinnest, when we can see more of the reality that’s all around us, and under a twilight like that one, with the kind of mood that was palpably in the air just then, that concept wasn’t at all hard to believe.

We have this thing other times, too. It’s the sun-zenith juiced-up tension radiating throughout this land sometimes around The Thing in the Spring (RIP), the raucous Kentucky Derby Carnivale revelry that always bursts forth on Children of the Arts Day (yes, I know what it’s called), the red-cheeked, foot-stamping reverence and wonder we share during our lantern walks, and it’s even elsewhere, too, like in the wholesome unabashed Americanity of Temple’s Fourth of July. We hit that sweet spot of special communion on those days not (or at least not just) because of the earth’s position with respect to the sun or even any mystical magic assigned to those days themselves, but because it’s a thing that’s always accessible to us if we know how to get it and why and then agree to get it together.

If this sounds a lot like an epiphany, honesty demands my confession that this is not the case. I’ve been writing about this subject for years and it’s something you might even say I focus on in a life sense; to call this moment of clarity an epiphany is to give me credit I don’t at all deserve considering the extent to which none of this should have been news to me. The truth is that in all the frustration and consternation and endless battling of the last couple of years, I allowed myself to forget something both so critical and so dear to the core of my being.

In doing so, I allowed myself to forget what led me - what led us - to purposefully settle not just in a town like this one and a region like this one, but in this town and in this region. I remember now. I’m going to try to keep remembering.

But let’s do this kind of thing a little more often, and maybe we can fight a little bit less.

The Melting of My Hard Halloween Heart

Thoughts on Compassion

Healing Space