Why I hate Halloween

This hateful apparition comes every year

We have lots of things in our culture that are direct import from the states. Starbucks. Bumper stickers. Drive-thrus. (God-awful spellings of such concepts.)

On a long drive, jet-lagged or hungover, I am grateful to the yanks and their Egg McMuffin. I love Five Guys more than your average American Joe (it’s the unlimited toppings). On pancake day, I am happy to drop our flimsy British crêpes for a thick, fluffy blueberry pancake. On October thirty-first, however, the Americans can suck a fat one.

Halloween is the worst of all the Americanisms. It’s not the near-diabetes inducing sugar levels, or the scary masks, nor the ghouls. (Well actually, it is those things too.)

I’ve been racking my brains as to where this hatred comes from. It would appear my phantomy-phobia began in childhood. Historically, I was a fancy-dress tragedy. My parents weren’t particularly crafty (or organised). They would often return home from a day at work, exhausted and panicked. My question about where the face paint was kept met with: “Shit! It’s trick or treating tonight isn’t it!?”

Suddenly, a wretched frenzy would begin. Old sweets we were never allowed were brought down from an out-of-reach cupboard and thrown into a basin for doorbell ringers. (We were a ‘have an apple if you’re hungry’ household). The witch’s hat descended the attic for its annual outing. The same spooky-sombrero recycled every year with black velvet trousers. Sustainable, at least. The trousers were an iconic fashion item, actually. If I had magical powers, I’d cast them back now in a larger size.

I had a loving childhood but there were some fundamentals my parents clearly couldn’t have been less interested in. Swimming and home-crafting were two of them. I couldn’t swim without arm bands until I was about eight. That’s not even hyperbole. So, aged seven, I hadn’t mastered how to breathe out under water without choking. (Still now, I always hold my nose while jumping into the sea.) Halloween often involved sticking your head into a paddling pool to bob the only sweet treats I was proffered as a kid. Luckily, I was able to use my painted face as disguise to not partake in the apple bobbing at Rob Statham’s Halloween party. And, hocus pocus, the hex paid off. I got away scot-free.

Terrifying Halloween phenomenons did not just come in the form of low-effort outfits and submersion-aversion. No, no. When children came trick-or-treating at my house, my mother made them perform in order to get their dose of glucose. Yes, you heard that right. They’d have to sing a ditty, recite a rhyme or rattle off a poem before being given sweets. Absolute witchcraft.

I recently had great delight finding out a man I was dating had performed one (or more?) of my Substacks to his housemates in some kind of living-kitchen-recital. Unlike my mother, I didn’t request this. That’s a bit mental isn’t it? I’ll take the flattery as a treat, but safe to say, we are no longer dating. (Nothing eerier than well-concealed commitment phobia, amirite?) I’m not a Swifie but Taylor’s lyrics: ‘a poet trapped in the body of a finance guy’ spring to mind.

Anyway, I digress. Back to my emotional childhood graveyard. Hearing a nine year-old zombie’s rendition of Spike Milligan at my front door for the third time, I stood by my mother’s side, insides churning. What made me jump out of my skin as the toilet paper-wrapped child from my school shouted ‘BOO!’ ending the third line of ‘The Ning Nang Nong’ was something far scarier than ghosts or supernatural creatures.