Halloween Haunts: A Marie Kondo Halloween by JG Faherty
Halloween Haunts: A Marie Kondo Halloween
by JG Faherty
Life is funny, and not always in the ha-ha way.
We spend most of it moving forward into the future. Growing up. Getting jobs. A place of our own. Cars. The world advances, technology advances, life gets busier and more complicated every year. Things change over time, and not always for the better.
This same transformation (some might say mutation!) has happened with our holidays. Traditions evolve or get lost completely. The simple things in life become commercialized and lose their meaning.
Charles Schultz depicted this magnificently in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” where Charlie and the gang get fed up with the commercialization of the holiday.
And, sad as it makes me to say it, I’ve reached that point with Halloween.
When I was young, growing up in the 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s (my college and new adult years), Halloween was this really cool holiday that I looked forward to months in advance. The day after Labor Day wasn’t just back to school for me, it was the start of the countdown to Halloween. It meant figuring out a costume, watching scary movies on TV or in the theaters, reading more horror books (if that was even possible). As the days grew chillier and the leaves changed color, my friends and I would play more frequently in the graveyards near our neighborhood; when we were older, we’d park there in our cars, turn on Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend,” and crack open a few beers.
Despite its popularity, Halloween back then was still a simple holiday. There was no Spirit Halloween store popping up (that didn’t happen in my area until the late 1990s). There was no internet to buy tons of interior and exterior decorations. Home Depot didn’t sell any holiday stuff except Christmas trees. If you wanted a costume, you went to the local CVS, WalMart, or Target.
Or you did what we did, and made your own.
Which was a lot of fun, because it forced people to be creative and original. The parties weren’t filled with a thousand Jigsaws or Naughty Nurses or Harley Quinns.
The same rule applied to your house. It took effort to decorate for Halloween. Today you can just back up your truck at Home Depot and fill it with lawn inflatables and giant animatronics and then go to Home Goods and buy carts of props, tombstones, and light-up figures. Or, even easier, whip out the latest Grandin Road and have it all delivered in a week.
Younger me might’ve been thrilled by these advances, especially back in the day when decorating meant hours carving pumpkins and spreading fake cotton spider webbing everywhere. Today’s me is fed up with it, because now anyone can create a haunted house with a credit card and Halloween is just a competition to see who can shove the most stuff into their yard. Yards that all start to blend into each other because everyone has the same crap.
One of the coolest things about the Halloween of my youth was its status as sort of an anti-holiday. Yes, there were parties. And costumes, and trick-or-treating, and even its own special on TV (“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!”). But compared to Christmas, it was an underground holiday. Santa had his jolly red suit, the Easter Bunny a basket full of neon eggs, but Halloween was like Johnny Rotten or the Ramones showing up at a snooty cocktail party decked out in skulls, fangs, and blood.
Halloween was a punk. It gave the finger to other holidays. It was tough, it was nasty, it was unpredictable.
I loved it.
(Speaking of skulls, don’t get me started on that – we horror folk used to search far and wide for some shirt or shoes with skulls; now they’re everywhere and even people who’ve never watched a horror movie or read a horror book are wearing them.)
Even after it grew increasingly commercial through the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, I dove headfirst into the Halloween spirit. After I got married, our house was always decorated more for Halloween than any other holiday. I’ve got a Halloween tree, a Halloween village, spooky dolls that scream and play music, and more.
Well, those days are over.
You see, I’m fed up with Halloween. The modern Halloween, to be precise. It’s boring, it’s corporate, it’s devoid of that subversive attitude.
I’m tired of driving down the road and seeing silly blow-up goofy demons and ghosts. Tired of Sirius XM’s two Halloween channels with nothing new on them for I don’t know how many years. Tired of Lowes, Home Depot, Michael’s, Home Goods, and all the other stores putting out their Halloween goods in freaking August. Tired of TV stations showing the same movies every Halloween. 31 Days of Halloween? Give me a break! Last year, on Freeform that meant bilge like “Hocus Pocus,” “The Witches,” and a Twilight marathon. Over on AMC you’re guaranteed to see all the Halloween and Friday the 13th movies ad infinitum. TCM at least gives you the old black and white horror from the 40s through the 60s, but… they’re always on after 11pm! Not cool on a work night.
Most of all, I’m damn tired of Halloween being a holiday for amateurs.
You know the ones. People who don’t even know one bit of the true history of Halloween having ‘crazy’ parties, which, just like on St. Patrick’s Day, are just an excuse to get drunk. Their lawns look like inflatable scenes from “Hotel Transylvania.” Everything they eat or drink has to be pumpkin spice. (Yeah, I love the stuff, but in moderation. We don’t need pumpkin spice Cheerios, Oreos, popcorn, potato chips, Twinkies, or Poo-Pourri!).
What people don’t do is tell each other scary stories. Talk about the best Halloween books. (My favorites are Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and my own Carnival of Fear.) Find something spooky to do, like visit a graveyard or a haunted house. Have movie marathons at home, and actually watch something other than “Friday the 13th” or “Saw” or “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Halloween” for the four-thousandth time!
I reached my breaking point last year and decided I’d had enough.
So I’m going Marie Kondo on my favorite holiday.
My breakthrough (or break down) happens to coincide with us moving to a new state in February of 2024, which makes my purge easier. I’m selling all my Halloween stuff except a few inside decorations and my Halloween tree. Starting over, new house, new traditions, reverting back to a simpler celebration. Our new place will be in a much more rural neighborhood and I’ve already heard that the locals have more old-fashioned traditions, like hayrides, pumpkin carving contests, and roadside stands for your cider instead of mass production in some giant kitchen.
The best part is, it’s an HOA community and gaudy blow ups and stuff aren’t allowed in the lawns!
All the crass materialism of Halloween can go right to hell with Freddy, and good riddance.
My plan for Halloween 2024 is to record classic, old-time horror movies throughout the year and then have my own 31 Nights of Halloween. Maybe have a few friends over and we can tell spooky stories from our childhoods. And, of course, watch “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
See, I grew up in the haunted Hudson Valley of New York, surrounded by legends of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, the Flying Dutchman, ancient Native American manitou, and alien sightings. My playground used to be a 19th-century cemetery. Now it’s all gone, replaced by condos, malls, neighborhoods, and parking lots. The people moving there from the city, the kids who are now becoming adults, they don’t know the history. They don’t know they’re shopping on top of the bones of Revolutionary War soldiers and their families.
I’ll miss living in an epicenter of horror, but I’m also looking forward to my new horror digs. Because in a way I’m not leaving horror behind, I’m just exchanging it. We’re moving to the Cape Fear area of North Carolina. A region nearly as haunted as my home town. Pirates, ghosts, swamp creatures. It’s all there waiting for me. Just like in the old days.
For this horror writer, it’s time to make Halloween great again.
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A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG Faherty has been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award (The Cure, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time), and he is the author of 19 books, 3 collections, and more than 85 short stories. He writes adult and YA dark fiction/sci-fi/fantasy, and his works range from quiet suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness. As a child, his favorite playground was a 17th-century cemetery, which many people feel explains a lot. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, www.instagram.com/jgfaherty, and http://www.jgfaherty.com/
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Below is a short poem from my poetry collection, Songs in the Key of Death, which just came out this month from Lycan Valley Press.
The Dentist
It eats me up inside
This rage
Overpowers me, takes control
A secret beast
Makes me hurt them, cause them pain
They don’t know when it will happen
But I know
When I hold the tools once more
Sharp, pointed
My hands become instruments of torture
They want to scream, to shout
To cry
I don’t stop; I go deeper
Deeper still
I smile behind my mask
Their blood is my joy, my goal
I want to laugh
I am the bringer of their pain
I hate them
Their vile, rotten mouths offend me
Songs in the Key of Death is available now from Amazon:
Greg,
I second every word of this! I appreciate the way you describe the Halloweens of yore as an anti- or “underground” holiday. (Tim Burton so brilliantly demonstrated the differences between Halloween, the naughty holiday, and Christmas, the nice one, in The Nightmare Before Christmas.)
Halloween has absolutely been more than just commercialized, it’s been corporatized, as you say. Even the grade-school trick-or-treaters come around in these elaborate Iron Man costumes with all the accoutrements, and I can’t help but recall those chintzy Ben Cooper costumes we wore — the ones that came in a flimsy cardboard box down at the drugstore, with the plastic masks that cut into the side of your face! Wearing one of those flammable Hefty bags, I absolutely felt like Batman or Dracula or whoever. It was low rent… but that’s the way it was supposed to be. Hell, that’s the way comic books were supposed to be before they became “IPs.” It was all less fun when it went mainstream.
My happiest memories of Halloween were driving up to Sleepy Hollow and Bear Mountain, where my father would tell me the legends of the Headless Horseman and Rip Van Winkle. And bobbing for apples on the terrace of our apartment. Or hugging my sister in terror as we watched the edited-for-television version of Halloween on WPIX. Or later, in college, when we’d all hang out at the local comic shop after hours, getting into costume, then partying the night away at the dive bar next door. You can’t buy that experience at a Spirit pop-up store.
Several years ago, my wife and I starting practicing minimalism, and we purged our home of any and all of those gaudy Halloween decorations. Now we simply adorn the place with real pumpkins or jack-o’-lanterns. They look great, they smell great, and I don’t have to store them in the closet the other eleven months of the year!
Great essay. Good luck with the move, and congrats on the publication of Songs in the Key of Death!
Sean