'The Excitement of a Holiday'

“Halloween afternoon; a small town; most of the store windows decorated with gravestones, witches, devils, and ghosts. Childish drawing. A little girl dressed as a rabbit being led across the street by her mother. A little boy in his mother’s skirts and shoes, his face smeared with her lipstick, leaning against a lamppost. The excitement of a holiday.” 

Halloween was the third of the Big Three holidays when I was a kid, judged by the intensity of our anticipation and greed. In order: Christmas, Birthday, Halloween, with St. Valentine’s Day a distant fourth (for the candy, not love). One year my parents went to a costume party. My mother rented a rabbit costume. My father wore his old Ike jacket, holstered .45 and fake beard, and went as Fidel Castro.

 

“After dark, children approaching lighted doors. A trick or treat. At ten or eleven a cold rain established itself firmly.”

 

We were home long before that. An old lady down the block dropped pennies in our sacks. A man two blocks away gave out small promotional loaves of Wonder Bread. No one worried about needles in candy bars or Seconal capsules handed out like jellybeans. One year, some older kid dropped a firecracker into a friend’s trick-or-treat bag, blowing out the bottom and spewing candy on the sidewalk.

 

“[The rain] fell on the quick and the dead and the unborn. What a profound pleasure I took in hearing it fall. How clearly I saw the complexity of the ground where it fell; dry leaves, curved leaves, hair moss and partridgeberry.”

 

The quoted passages are from a 1952 entry in The Journals of John Cheever (1991). In his story “Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger” (published in the January 1972 issue of Playboy), the title character writes in a letter to a woman in the Soviet Union:

 

“Tonight is Halloween. I don’t suppose you have that is Russia. It is the night when the dead are supposed to arise, although they don’t, of course, but children wander around the streets disguised as ghosts and skeletons and devils and you give them candy and pennies. Please come to my country and marry me.”