Originally published at: Forget drugs in candy — Halloween is a day of ritual sacrifice for the cult of the automobile | Boing Boing
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Not surprising, sadly.
Be careful out there…
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I’d be very interested to know how much this varies based on which day of the week Halloween falls on. Is it lower on weekends, when fewer people are rushing to drive home to start Trick-or-treating with their kids?
I think it’s high time we consider making Halloween a national holiday. It’s already a much bigger deal for most Americans than holidays like Labor Day or President’s Day.
Edit to add:
As the article notes, this isn’t really about Halloween anyway. It’s needlessly dangerous for people to walk around American neighborhoods at dusk on any day of the year, and the only difference from Halloween is that a lot more people happen to be doing it that night. Year-round traffic safety measures and pedestrian-friendly street design are the best solution. I’d still like Halloween to be a National holiday though…
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But it’s Devil-worship! /s
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Also, we should have 2 months of halloween and keep Christmas confined entire to december…
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My workplace already does celebrate Halloween for 2 full months, but they don’t wait until after it’s over before gearing up for Christmas. They’ve already got some of their Christmas decorations going up now.
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I was under the vague impression that trick-or-treating had undergone a severe decline in recent decades already?
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That’s certainly not the case in my neighborhood. And Halloween retail spending overall has been growing steadily for many years.
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It hasn’t slowed down in my neighborhood, either. Kids come from surrounding neighborhoods to trick-or-treat in ours. Happiest day some of these kids will have all year, we’re happy to oblige them.
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Halloween is a day of ritual sacrifice for the cult of the automobile
To be fair - that’s every day, in every way. America worships the car and the gun, and every day is a day of sacrifices, and the entire society is built around the presumption that this is how things should be.
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Let’s make it illegal to drive after dark on Halloween.
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My kids (7 and 10) are not super into it. They’re both super picky eaters so they don’t like a lot of the candy they get, and the 7 year old has lived a large percentage of her life during a pandemic so we didn’t do trick or treat for a couple years (and one year we were in Disneyworld for Halloween). They might do 10 houses. This year my son is more interested in handing out candy (he loves little kids and he’s big enough that they think he is a cool big kid) so he’s just going to do that and buy himself a bag of candy he actually likes. He’s also thinking about riding around on his bike handing out candy to little kids around the neighborhood, which I think would be cute!
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The people on our local Nextdoor were sharing this rainbow fentanyl in the halloween candy shit, and they were PRESSED when presented with actual facts.
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I crew up on roads that didn’t have street lights and winters aren’t exactly bright but we had reflectors…
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It’s one of those “Eve” holidays
Maybe Nov. 1 should be the day off
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[ condescending smug mode on ]
It is. In my state.
[ condescending smug mode off ]
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This is why I emigrated to Europe, to get away from the cult of the car, the cult of the gun. But the cult of the car is still strong here, and people still get killed walking on the sides of roads that have no sidewalks. I recall a story of a man who struck and killed the custodian of a town church, then had the gall to approach the man’s widow to “negotiate” how she was going to pay for the damage to his car!
Sure, I missed Halloween when I settled in here, and when my daughter was little we did do some trick or treating with her to bemused German homes who had never heard of Halloween. This was around 2000-2005, nowadays there are kids who have picked up the habit and I have some candy for the one or two kids who do knock on my apartment door. And ironically, now live a village away from the self-described largest Halloween store in Europe!
But yeah, the grim statistic reminds us of the bad choices we made, which we will then moan about and in the same breath say it’s too late now to really change anything, no one will want sidewalks going through their front lawns that no one uses any more, they’re too expensive. And we need our cars, since there’s no public transportation network here worth mentioning. And so on.
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