Halloween Thoughts

Halloween used to feel like the one night the whole world agreed to play pretend. No grades, no curfews, no grown-up worries—just a pillowcase and the promise of candy. I remember the chill in the Bronx air, the way the streetlights turned orange and fuzzy through the eyeholes of a plastic mask that smelled like fresh factory plastic and my own breath. I was Freddy Krueger one year, the rubber glove claws clicking against my thigh as I ran from stoop to stoop. Another year I was Skeletor, cape snagging on chain-link fences, voice modulator crackling “Nyaaah!” until the batteries died and I just sounded like a kid with a cold. The neighbors knew us. Mrs. Lopez on 187th always gave full-size Hershey bars. Mr. Delgado pretended to be scared of my monster roar, then slipped an extra Snickers into the bag “for the little beast.”

School made it official. At C.S. 57 the teachers turned the hallways into a haunted house of construction-paper bats and cotton-ball cobwebs. My third-grade teacher, Ms. Rivera, came as a vampire with a cape made from a black trash bag. But the real legend was Principal Rothchild. Every year she’d back her boxy Miranda—must’ve been an ’83 or ’84—right up to the curb, pop the trunk, and cackle from inside a pointy hat and green face paint. We’d scream, scatter, then creep back because we knew she’d toss handfuls of Smarties like confetti. That was permission: the grown-ups were in on the game.

Fast-forward twenty-five years and I’m the uncle holding the flashlight, steering my nephew and niece through Belmont. Same ritual, different borough. My nephew’s Spider-Man mask keeps slipping; my niece insists on being Elsa even though it’s forty degrees. The stoops are closer together here, the porches decorated with those inflatable pumpkins that glow like lanterns. Kids still yell “Trick or treat!” but half of them are checking their phones between houses. One dad films the whole route on a gimbal like he’s Scorsese. I catch myself thinking: When did we start needing proof that fun happened?

The nostalgia stings because the world underneath the costumes has cracked. In the old neighborhood, you worried about razor blades in apples—an urban legend nobody actually saw. Now the news carries real blades, real bullets, kids settling scores before they can spell them. Gangs wear colors I never noticed as a child. Poverty looks the same—peeling paint, busted streetlights—but it’s louder now, amplified by viral videos of fights in bodegas, of mothers begging on TikTok live streams. Social media sells connection but mostly teaches kids to perform cruelty for likes. A mean comment travels faster than any ghost story we whispered under blankets.

I watch my niece trade candy with a stranger’s kid on the sidewalk—no fear, just sugar diplomacy—and I want to bottle that trust. Halloween was the annual reminder that strangers could be kind if everyone agreed to suspend reality for a few hours. We need that suspension more than ever, a national pause button where the only thing that jumps out of the trunk is a cackling principal in green face paint.

Maybe the costumes have always been armor. Mine hid a shy eight-year-old who practiced Skeletor laughs in the mirror. Today’s kids armor up with filters and follower counts. The trick now is convincing them the game still works if they put the phones down, ring a doorbell, and believe—for one night—that the world wants to give them something sweet.