The Importance of Halloween

A moment from the 2018 Browning Halloween Parade

2020 has been an incredibly difficult year, one which has shown us so much tragedy, injustice, uncertainty, and dislocation on a national scale. And even if we can endure these historic disruptions and indiginities, our calendar is still bringing us smaller frustrations; indeed, is anyone really looking forward to colder weather, the darkened afternoons of Standard Time, or one more day of electoral politics? Amidst our challenges, great and small, it seems to me that even the slightest joys need to be treasured more than usual. For me, one of these joys comes with my family’s yearly viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown—and so, naturally, for the first time since 1966 the animated classic won’t air on network or cable television. It’s 2020, and I got a rock.

I never suspected that I would be using this space to defend the importance of Halloween, but here I am. Here, please let me be as clear as possible that I am not endorsing traditional door-to-door trick-or-treating (particularly indoors!), large costume parties, and haunted houses this year; indeed, the Center for Disease Control has classified these as high-risk activities, and participating in them threatens both individual and community health. But the significance of ritual in the lives of our kids should not be underestimated, especially in this pandemic period. Without important social signifiers and rites of passage, our time can lose much of its rhythm and anticipated structure, which may leave many of us—our young people especially—feeling unmoored. While public safety concerns have necessarily and understandably reduced our typical social attachments, they need not preclude our finding ways to celebrate this holiday.  Such finding speaks to the fact that Halloween is not simply cosplay and candy; it’s a ceremony of community connection through which imagination, kindness, and innocent joy can reign.  

So, if we choose, we can still don our costumes, leave candy for trick-or-treaters on our stoops and at our doors, and bear witness to each other’s creativity and generosity from a safe social distance. And at Browning, we have chosen to keep our Halloween Parade this year, albeit under modified terms. Credit for these adjustments is due to Head of Lower School Eric Ogden (whose enthusiasm for Halloween is the match of even the most eager Browning boy) and to all our Lower School faculty, whose flexibility has allowed us to preserve so much of what is essential in our boys’ academic and social experience. In this year’s ceremony, boys will parade by class, not as a whole division; they will walk a shorter parade route; they will maintain social distance—and we will all thus hold onto an important ritual of sharing and pretending, one which keeps each of us younger just a little bit longer.

One of the challenges of this difficult period—a period of uncertainty, of fatigue, of frustration—is to make sure that despair does not have the last word. It is easy to see how much we have forfeited, and we should be honest about these challenges, but we also do well to recognize how much meaning we still have the power to create. We may miss out on the Great Pumpkin, but in working together in creativity and integrity and good will, and in seeing the power of ritual and connection and togetherness, we can certainly find ways to make our Halloween—and all of the days beyond—into something worth celebrating.