Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it's probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.
Take "stranger danger," the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the "Bewitched" and "Brady Bunch" costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.
That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)Obviously, be careful out there, but let's not all turn into paranoiacs. In the article linked above, see the statement by Professor Letourneau after studying 30 years of crime statistics:
"We almost called this paper, 'Halloween: The Safest Day of the Year,' because it was just so incredibly rare to see anything happen on that day."In a slightly unrelated note, it reminds me of Spike on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" once noting that Halloween is the usual day off for ghouls and monsters and things that go bump in the night.
For another kind of Halloween-related paranoia, there's this. Hey, folks, the fact it's FUN to dress up and carve pumpkins and eat candy doesn't mean we're all going to run off and be Satanists. Try "The Great Pumpkin Proposes a Toast" (with a nod of course to C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters).
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