Every December, during a slow news week, conservative talking heads will air their woes regarding social secularization and America’s increasing trend toward atheism. They’ll do this in talk-show segments they’ve pithily titled ‘The War on Christmas’; the brunt of this culture “war”  is unfounded nonsense, most of which is just white noise to people, or a mild annoyance for the too-online crowd (such as myself). However, there actually is an insidious holiday-related cultural conflict occurring in America – but this time, it’s horrifyingly real, and threatens to destroy one of our most important cultural institutions; that’s right, I’m talking about the War on Halloween. As it turns out, a pagan holiday where you dress up as a ghoul and demand free hand-outs doesn’t mesh well with the widely protestant culture of the United States. Some Christian groups have been opposed to the holiday since its cultural inception in the mid eighteen hundreds, but it’s taken many years for these attitudes to bubble over into sociological change like we see today. This modern flavor of anti-halloween sentiments came to a head in the late nineteen eighties to early nineties, wherein church groups began actively offering an alternative to the traditional halloween night – the most famous of these alternatives being “Trunk or Treat.” Trunk or Treat, as an institution, is the singularly most damning indictment of American culture as it relates to Halloween. For those that are unfamiliar, instead of the traditional night of walking home-to-home asking for candy, Trunk or Treat events instead celebrate halloween by localizing a community in a singular location (typically during the day) wherein candy is distributed from the trunks of cars (hence: “trunk”). According to the creators of these events, Trunk or Treat offers a safer, more equitable alternative to the traditional Halloween night for families, to which I counter: safe from what, exactly? What do these people think is the biggest risk to children’s safety during Halloween, or rather: what are they protecting these children from? I have some guesses. For example, every year it feels like there’s some big scandal surrounding a psychopath poisoning children’s candy – a scandal which always ends up being a hoax, but is, admittedly, a scary fiction. It also seems like there’s a commonality of localized urban legend of child-butchers who roam the dark streets of affluent neighborhoods, which, needless to say, also aren’t true stories, but may dissuade parents from wanting their children to roam the streets at night. As empathetic as I may be to these concerns, the material reality simply doesn’t support harboring these fears. If anything, these pervasive social myths feed the problem itself, rather than constitute it in totality. No, the biggest threat to children on Halloween night isn’t psychopathic neighbors, satanic brainwashing, or evil ghosts. . . But do you know what actually kills children every single Halloween? In record numbers? Cars.

Yeah, cars. The fatality rate for pedestrian-vehicle accidents DOUBLES every Halloween for children, and this rate has steadily increased in conjunction with a general increase in truck and SUV size in America. Some SUVs have a front blind spot so egregious that upwards of five small children can stand in a straight line from the bumper to the road and the driver cannot see them over the hood. Worse yet, modern suburb developments are increasingly car-centric, meaning that some neighborhoods don’t even have sidewalks! You can’t even walk safely from house to house if you wanted to! Combine this with a dark and gloomy Halloween night, and you have the perfect conditions for the mass vehicular death of children. And there lies the cruelest irony of all; cars have become so culturally-centrazing that the response to mass child killing via cars on Halloween isn’t to make better, safer neighborhoods, nor ban ridiculous tank-esque dual-wheeled trucks and SUVs; no, the American solution is to use our cars EVEN MORE! Automobiles are so ubiquitous to the American conception of public life that there is simply no alternative to their oppressive existence – cars make it unsafe for us to walk on Halloween night? Oh well, drive your car to the local church and feed children candy out of it instead. Don’t have a car? Tough luck. 

There’s a wider conversation to be had here – something to the effect of how American Christianity has been co-opted to justify our capitalistic status-quo, or how social paranoia alienates us from our neighbors and, by extension, our social class. . . but who cares about that, right? Let’s just go to a party, eat candy, and dress up in funny clothes. Try not to think about it. Happy Halloween.