Demand that strangers give you treats

Halloween is the last bit of wild chaos we have. Don't sanitize it.

This year, for Halloween, I beg you: Go to a stranger’s house, knock on the door, and demand a treat. Remind these strangers that ancient magic still exists, that the laws of tradition and rite insist they must hand you a token, a boon, a bribe to ward off evil.

Let Halloween help remind us all of the value of wild nights, where things are different, outside the rules, that no one is in charge, and no corporation or religion regulates how we scare off the bad things.

Trick-or-treating has no sponsor. Demanding candy from strangers is not a religious celebration, Halloween commemorates no historical event, and it doesn’t give us a three-day weekend or honor war heroes.

And yet somehow, in a world where we’ve lost most of our traditions, trick-or-treating has survived. It shouldn’t exist: If someone came from a part of the world without Halloween, it would be hard to explain that one day a year, and only on that day, we go to a stranger’s door dressed as something terrifying and otherworldly, and demand they hand us gifts.

Scout as the “Crow Queen” two years ago.

Trick-or-treating is ancient and primal, born out of a very human need. In our sanitized, safe world, we hide the dark parts of life from children, sometimes even from ourselves, and this is our last collective remembrance, handed down for centuries, to show our children how we deal with fear.

Our fears feel different than the ones our ancestors faced.
Death is far away, hidden, clean, something that happens to old people after a long life. We don’t lose one out of every five babies, and we don’t bury children after plagues. We don’t fear darkness — we always have light in our hands. Our children don’t use the outhouse by candlelight, don’t hear wolves in the distance, and don’t have to walk through dark paths alone when they lose track of time. Our fears now are more existential, less tangible, and harder to face. The boogeymen are nebulous images in the news, harder to face because you can’t bar the door and keep them out. A good torch and a prayerbook won’t banish the things that are coming for us.

But for one night, our children can pretend to be someone else to frighten away terrible things. A mask is a protective barrier between our world of safety and the world of the unknown.

For one night, let your children exist outside the regular rules and constraints and skip all of the sanitized celebrations. Carve real pumpkins and use sharp knives. Make a mess. Embrace the chaos of creating a costume to confuse the spirits.

On this one night that connects us with our past, with our great-grandparents who grew up in a world without a Spirit Halloween, and with Amazon to order a costume, make something weird and wild. Use your imagination. And go trick-or-treating somewhere you’ve never been, in a neighborhood you don’t know.

Let your children threaten strangers at their front door with a mild “trick” if they don’t comply with their demands.

A plague doctor. Masks have always been worn to face horrors.

Tell your children that we live in a scary world and always have, and teach them that humans have always created rituals to say, "BOO!" to the darkness.

We face strangers because we’re brave.

We wear costumes so the bad things are frightened of us, but also because we’re frightened. There are some things we can’t face as a regular human in regular clothes. But we can pretend. We can, for one night, show up as someone who is brave, funny, or terrifying, and we can wear a mask that puffs us up and makes us invincible.

For one night, we can laugh at death. We raise a light to the dark.

We can wage war against the four horsemen.

We push back against devils, death, demons, and destruction by scaring them the way they scare us.

We demand sugar and sweets to remind ourselves that our community has a shared humanity. We're all afraid, together, of what's "out there," even when we don’t talk about it. We come together in our shared ritual to indulge in sweet things, shiver a little to feel alive, and connect with our ancestors.

Don't take candy from friends and store owners in a parking lot from a trunk.

Don't accept a "harvest festival" or a safe, clean, easy-and-fun Halloween.

The world is scary. There is real danger, real worry, and the hoofbeats of the four horsemen grow louder. Those are the wolves our children hear at night.

Our children, too, have heard the horses approaching, and lately, as the slow trot turns to a gallop, our children need us to say, “Yes. We hear it. We know. And we have a way to deal with the things that frighten us.”

We can teach our children to don the garments they need to feel protected in battle, put on some face paint, and yell, "I'm not scared of you! Go away, ghosties!" into the night.

And we can teach our children that when we face the darkness, we’ll do it together, hopefully fortified by a pillowcase full of sugar and chocolate.