A Night for More Than Fear

What difference does it make if the thing you’re scared of is real or not?

That question, from a character in Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, “Song of Solomon,” hangs in the air these chilly fall nights.

Fear--the real, gnawing kind--grabbed us each by the throat last month. Soon comes Halloween, when fear is supposed to be about having fun--thrills and chills, roiling dry-ice caldrons, black-toothed witches and bloodcurdling screams. Is fear still fun when there’s real terror out there? What happens when the parents who coax their little princesses and superheroes up darkened porches, past toothy jack-o’-lanterns, are themselves afraid? Not of the crepe-paper goblins or the rubber spiders bobbing over the neighbor’s front door or the creepy music coming from inside but scared stiff about who or what is on the airplane, about what may fall out of an envelope or waft through the office air conditioning vents.

In the meantime, everyone goes on, insisting that the terrorists can’t stop everyday life. Halloween this year will become another occasion to mark that resolve and draw comfort from “normal” lives.

Indeed, in recent weeks cardboard witches and strings of pumpkin lights have sprouted next to Old Glory, already flying from so many porches and front lawns. Americans are expected to collectively shell out $7 billion, a record, on costumes for their kids or themselves, decorations and food by the time the annual fright fest is over. By Wednesday, the pumpkins will be carved and the candy waiting in a bowl by the front door. And as before, children will paint their faces, don their costumes and trundle through the dark streets, largely oblivious to the world of turmoil around them.

For those parents trailing behind who feel like the skunk at the party--gently steering their kids away from unfamiliar houses, warily scanning the night sky and searching for hazards that might lurk in candy bags--maybe they will instead discover, in this annual ritual of pretending, something more than just pretending. At Halloween, trick-or-treaters have dressed up as the things that are the most frightening--but also as the things that are most amusing and inspiring. Halloween has never been solely about fear. Nor will it become that this year.