There’s always the occasional house that goes completely mad with the Christmas lights. Every community in Ireland has at least one of them: they do it – sometimes – to raise money for charity, or just to draw attention to themselves. Or both.
And that’s grand. It’s Christmas, after all; a time when, theoretically, we let each other do what we do without any judgment. Some might choose to have a wreath or a candle in the window. Some might do nothing. Some might wish to have their gaff photographed by the International Space Station. There’s room for all; and there isn’t, as far I can tell, any great inter-house competition.
Halloween, though: that’s different. You might have noticed it yourself. There’s nothing short of an arms race going on. Where I live, some of the houses had the front garden displays turned on weeks ago. By now, my street has been transformed into a ghoulish, blood-dripping Disneyland.
And we’re not talking about cheap tat you might get in one of the bargain shops. There’s light displays and sound effects, giant webs and animatronic creatures. Some appear to have even dug up parts of their front gardens to create a more realistic sense of zombies rising from the grave. Postal workers and delivery drivers have to step over corpses. With each year, I’m amazed by the innovation and intrigued with where they source these decorations. Some of them should really give up the day job and start designing sets for Metallica.
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We’re not immune from this. We have a child in the house who has been counting down the days to Halloween while trying out various iterations of her scary clown outfit. Last year, our outdoor offering was a giant spider web that blew away in a storm. This year, in a mad fit of optimism, we’ve gone with the same thing. If you’re in the area, you should see it flying over Dublin Bay any day now.
The night does have its downsides, of course. In the centre of towns and cities, young adults dressed as mobile phones and giant bananas will be rampaging around the place, while in the suburbs there will be the ever-present risk of the kids falling into diabetic shock. And at the end of the night, there may even be complaints. Inevitably, at least one of the houses will have given out nuts and fruit.
There’s also the guilty period, when you’ve run out of sweets and have to quickly turn out the lights and ignore the doorbell. Even from inside, you can hear their little hearts being crushed.
Yet despite all that, Halloween has become a time of the year that is arguably more Christmassy than Christmas. There is far less pressure and far more generosity. As often as not, the run-up to December 25th isn’t all peace and good will: it’s stress and consumerism and the grinding pressure on everyone to be happy and festive. Often, this has the opposite effect. For many people, Christmas can be extremely lonely.
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Halloween, by contrast, is a night when people do something for others without expecting anything in return. Yes, most families buy in sacks of chocolate and scarify their front gardens because they have children in the house. But many do it even when the kids have long since grown up. Kids and adults are out on the street, smiling and talking and calling into neighbours that they may not know at all. And even though this is an Americanised version of a festival we invented, it does feel like it’s grown into a genuine community-based event.
The lavish high-tech displays in the front gardens are to be admired, not envied: and the people going to all that trouble aren’t doing it to show off, but to make a contribution. Weirdly, ghouls and ghosts and monsters are bringing us a little bit closer together.
