Halloween is upon us. As usual, I’m reminded to be sober-minded and watchful. “Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” — haha.
But seriously, what’s the deal with Halloween? Why do we have this? We don’t get time off from work. There’s no holiday pay if you do have to work. There’s candy but it only makes us sick. What’s the point?
One clue might be in the name. Halloween = the day before All Saints Day. Who are these saints and what do they have to do with tricking and treating? What do they have to do with dressing up as witches or cats?
When I was a kid I couldn’t answer these questions. I had no idea what was going on until I was 12 years old.
That was the year my father decided to retire in Mexico. He came to the end of his time in the Army. His 20 years were up. He had a pension coming to him, and he wanted to live off it. He started looking at his options. While doing so, he came across a book written by an American about his idyllic life in a village on the shores of Lake Chapala in Mexico. So, the way my father’s mind worked, he said to himself, “That’s what I should do, I should use my pension to live an idyllic life in a village by Lake Chapala in Mexico.”
So we packed up the green station wagon and we drove from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to Lake Chapala, more or less. There was more to it than that. There were visas to get, and immunization shots — about three weeks worth of shots, as it seemed to me, the 12 year old. I did not take turns driving the green station wagon. I was put in charge of reading the maps.
The book that was my father’s plan for his retirement was missing some information. For example, how do you retire in a fishing village living like the natives and simultaneously provide for the continuing education of your 12 year old? So the plan was modified to include long stays in Guadalajara to take advantage of the big city’s schools, university and libraries.
So we ended up mostly living in Guadalajara and spending school breaks at beautiful scenic Lake Chapala with its fishing boats, mariachi bands and scads of ex-pat Americans, all of whom, it seemed, had read the same book my father had.
What does all this have to do with Halloween, you ought to be asking by now. Well, I’m getting to that. So Halloween came around at the end of October, as it always does, and I was in school then. So I was in Guadalajara. And I had American friends who were the sons of other expats who all read the same book and found the same places to live in Guadalajara to get them into the same school.
So we wanted to go trick-or-treating and make a haul of candy.
We didn’t have costumes but we figured that as a bunch of American kids we were probably scary enough as we were. So we went into the neighborhood looking for all the candy that simply had to be there.
Well, we scored some chocolate from a nice elderly woman who thought we were clearly nuts when we managed to explain to her we wanted chocolate. She said it was the only chocolate she had. We drooled at the sight of it. It was as big as a brick.
It was baking chocolate.
As I tasted it, a hitherto unused synapse in my brain connected. The synapse said, “This isn’t the U.S. This is Mexico. What do you bet they don’t have Halloween here?”
That little synapse was right. We kids had discovered we were in the wrong culture to be trick-or-treating. What we learned was that Halloween is not universal. Where you find it, it’s part of the whole culture you’re in, and where you don’t find it, it isn’t.
Eventually, while at the University of Washington, I took a course they called sociology 101, and I learned the same thing, but it took 10 weeks and there were extraneous exams and an annoying teacher I could have done without.
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