Around mid-October, my wife and I decided to put up some seasonal decorations. We bought some pumpkins from a local farmer, and we found a wreath with prominent reds and oranges for our front door.
The neighbors, on the other hand, went for a radically different aesthetic—starting in mid-September. Adorning their front door and garage were vinyl stickers mimicking bloody handprints, and words meant to look like they were finger-painted in yet more blood. As I left for work each morning, I couldn’t miss this display of exclamations: “Help us,” “Dead zone,” “Go back,” and “Run!!!” And the pièce de résistance: a massive, Fathead-sized vinyl sticker of a faux-Jigsaw serial killer brandishing a butcher knife.
Was I speaking in the past tense? My mistake: As of mid-December, these decorations are still up.
Halloween has evolved—or devolved—in recent years, and some of the ways that people in my own age cohort (millennials) celebrate it have become legitimately annoying. Nevertheless, Halloween gets off rather easily in the laundry list of problems people have with the “holi-daze.” In big-box stores all the way down to local grocers, Christmas seems to come earlier every year; it’s a complaint that is at least as old as the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. Many people get at least as outraged about Christmas trees in September as I get about Jigsaw in December.
But nowadays in America, we’re beginning to get a taste of what the alternative to Christmas craziness could look like: An eternal October that takes up the entire back-half of the year—not in any sort of seasonal concord with Christmas, but actually in complete opposition to it. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton: “When men stop celebrating Christmas they don’t just celebrate nothing; they celebrate anything.”
My point here is purely pragmatic. Yes, ideally I’d choose a world where each holiday is celebrated for a reasonable timeframe. I am, after all, in the process of becoming Catholic—a church where every season has its allotted place, not to be exceeded.
But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we’ve moved into a world where all of the colder months in America are dominated by one kind or another of mandatory holiday cheer. Christmas has taken a lot of flak for being the main enforcer of this kind of “mandatory fun” for decades now. Now, we see an alternative.
Why Halloween? A major reason is that millennials have finally, gracelessly lapsed into middle age, and they’ve smuggled into adulthood their early-internet love of kitsch and cringing irony. Indeed, millennials are some of the first metaphorical casualties of “childhood … leaking further and further into adult life,” wrote now-Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith back in 2017. Smith thinks the millennial failure to launch manifests with continued interest in juvenalia because they are, in effect, replacing the children they would’ve had if they had only settled down. Now that is a truly spooky proposition.
Frankly, if we have to have a giant, mega-corporate holiday in this country, I’d much rather have Thanksgiving than Halloween. But as Jack Butler, a man I definitely do not know, has said, Thanksgiving has undergone a kind of “temporal pincer movement,” where each year runs the risk of the holiday being crushed by the pressures of Halloween on one end and Christmas on the other. This is in spite of the fact that Americans rate Thanksgiving more highly than any other holiday, even as the propaganda campaign that sells the whole holiday as nothing more than “arguing with Boomers at the dinner table” proceeds apace on social media.
But no, in the world we live in, it’s either Christmas or Halloween. And in this world, the current crop of prime earning-age adults are millennials. They also happen to be the most unchurched adults anyone has seen since people decided to record that kind of thing. Of course they’re obsessed with Halloween. It may have started as a holiday with traditionally religious implications—warding off evil spirits and all that—but the imagery of death and creatures out of a Puritan’s worst nightmares has been divorced from its meaning, and what we’re left with is this shallow celebration of horror movies and assorted imagery that’s more kitschy than scary in order to maximize consumer appeal. (Skeletons! Black cats!)
Imagine if Dia de los Muertos had no spiritual purpose; it would be a little bizarre and disturbing to see people parading in skull makeup. Similarly, when Halloween becomes devoid of its folk-religious origins, it just becomes this watered-down thing that’s pointless but vaguely demonic. Halloween is no longer the preserve of children; it’s an excuse for socially anxious millennials (who are largely still childless) to play dress-up. It’s much easier for the irony-poisoned millennial to buy into something that’s not all that deep, rather than a holiday like Christmas that becomes necessarily about God when one thinks about it for five seconds.
But the ironically festive skeletons, the heavy metal albums that only get played once a year at house parties, the fake blood—it’s all just so ugly. When done by adults pushing 40, Halloween is no longer joyful and exciting in the way it is for grateful youngsters asking for candy. Instead, it’s a kind of sad redo of high school—the last moment before the millennial became jaded, addicted to Twitter (or X, or whatever), and saddled with the dreaded “student debt.”
As for the neighbors, I’m not sure how they feel about Christmas. But I fear those vinyls may never come off. Like an ill-fated “BERNIE 2016” bumper sticker plastered to the back of a 2009 Nissan Cube, the damn things might be impossible to take off without stripping the paint from the door. If nothing else, I can hope that if the decals are still up on Valentine’s Day, the excuse is that they can’t take them off, rather than they won’t.
