Happy Hallow-GREEN?

This year, the usual things happened for Halloween: Wal-Mart and the other merchants put out the Halloween decorations and candy some time around Labor Day, a full two months before October 31st. There was, once again, enough Halloween candy, decorations, and costumes to fill at least two trams, plus even more Halloween underwear, this time for men and women, than last year (though I still gave the thongs a miss). Not everything is about the same. For one thing, for the first time in more than twenty years, I didn't carve a jack-o-lantern for Halloween, and putting a small wreath on the door and an electric artificial jack-o-lantern in the window was the extent of my decorating.
Bram was as amenable as ever about having a homemade costume, and this year we made it completely with recyclables and things left over from previous years' costumes. He really wanted his costume to make a statement about the environment, so he went as the endangered American Crocodile. We used some of the fabric I bought at Goodwill nine(!) years ago, cardboard from the box his trampoline came in, leftover paint, duck tape from 9/11. For the eyes we used earplugs we got from one of the airlines.
Bram's school has embraced "Going Green" with such enthusiasm that they had every student and teacher make costumes from recyclables and items that were headed for the landfill. On Friday, they staged a New Orleans style parade around the quarter-mile running track. It was the first Halloween Parade I had ever heard of. It was cute, and it reminded me how much Halloween has changed since I was a child. Halloween used to be only about dressing up and going door to door to get candy. Sometimes there was a Halloween Carnival, though we rarely went. (Remember: for us, it was all about the free candy). Halloween was very much a children's celebration. These days, however, there are just as many, if not more adult costumes in the stores and adult activities in the community. It seems that visiting haunted houses--really scary haunted houses-- and going through corn mazes at midnight are overshadowing Trick-or-Treating as the primary ritual for the day. I find this change interesting because it seems not so much a new invention in ritual as a reversion to the original focus of Halloween rituals: messing around with the really scary spirits of the dead. But I still get the biggest kick out of seeing young children in costumes at my door, shouting "Trick-or-Treat!" and then craning their little necks so they can see what they got. It's like magic, isn't it? Say three words and you get candy from stangers.