By Katharine Sargent
In Arnold Lobel’s iconic Frog and Toad series, there is a lesser-known volume entitled Shivers, in which Frog tells Toad the story of the “Old Dark Frog”—a ghostly amphibian who haunts the woods near their home. At the end of the spooky tale, Frog and Toad sit around the fire, teacups shaking on their laps. Lobel writes, “They were having the shivers, it was a good, warm feeling.”
I am here to advocate that modern Halloween (at least in the United States) has departed from invoking the “shivers” into either a full-fledged consumerist spectacle or a too-scary ghoul-fest. Where are the days of pumpkins, occasional tissue-paper ghosts, and the odd witch? Why does every decoration have to emit light, cackle, or scream at me as I walk past?
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. It’s funny, because growing up in the ‘90s, we lived in a house on a dirt road that hardly got any trick-or-treaters. Still, my brothers and I loved decorating the house with jack-o’-lanterns and candles in the windows, as if throngs of little Luke Skywalkers or witches and mummies would come knocking. We loved how spooky it was. The dark corners of the night, rustling leaves, and quiet streets were the stuff of Halloween dreams.
Fast-forward, and Halloween has been transformed. By mid-July, Costco and the other big-box stores are stocked with this year’s must-have decorations. By now, you have certainly seen the giant skeletons from Home Depot (or the even bigger skeleton heads from Costco) popping out of lawns all across the country. But I must know: where do you store this stuff during the year? Isn’t it all a little too scary for the very small humans who will be doing the trick-or-treating?
How is everyone affording this?
We have neighbors who set up a veritable menagerie of spooky spectacles in their yard each Halloween: automatic plastic pumpkins that open up to show sticky brains, skeletons who shake and cackle, fog machines pouring purple smoke, and scary movies playing on projectors. On the hill, a Headless Horseman oversees the festivities.
Honestly, my kids go nuts for it.
Thankfully, we don’t live in a town that is inundated with pumpkin installations. Don’t get me wrong—I think a classic pumpkin is maybe the most perfect Halloween decoration there is. But fifty piled high on suburban porches? That’s a squirrel buffet, if you ask me. And don’t get me started on the inflatables.
It’s hard to deny the fact that many of these decorations are, in part, designed to live online. Every year, there is grumbling that influencers and online personalities are pushing the seasons too early. Trends come fast and furious. This year it’s “throwback to ‘90s Halloween,” and next year it will be “1940s Halloween,” complete with haunted record players and zombie World War II soldiers.
After that, it will probably be “Sense and Sensibility Halloween,” which doesn’t even make sense because that holiday didn’t exist in 18th-century Britain.
I digress.
Last night, I visited my brother and sister-in-law in Connecticut, and they were entertaining my children by playing atmospheric background videos on YouTube. For the uninitiated, you can go to YouTube right now and search basically anything “+ background video,” and you will get a result. Want to imagine you are in a sleepy pub and it’s raining in the springtime? Easy. Want to go to a haunted Western town and watch ghoul cowboys lope down dusty streets? Say no more. Thunderstorms in the distance as you sit in front of a smoldering fire? No problem.
My kids preferred the Halloween ones where, at various points, ghosts and jack-o’-lanterns would pop up from behind gravestones, or witches passed by the moon with a cackle of glee.
When my kids retired to watch cartoons in the next room, we settled on a video of an old Victorian house perched on a hill in the evening. Dark orange leaves shook in the foreground, and a plump jack-o’-lantern sat cozily on the porch. In the background, muffled oldies played between gusts of wind. The house was lit up, and it was easy to imagine an old-fashioned Halloween party inside: apple cider donuts and bobbing for apples, with nobody on a smartphone.
My brother and I remarked how this felt like Halloween to us. Not every holiday has to be so over-the-top, so commercialized, so extra. Perhaps I am searching for a time when every headline didn’t cause heart palpitations. The world is scary enough as it is, all on its own.
On the drive home, a half-moon shone brightly on the dark streets, and as I turned off the highway into our leafy neighborhood, a few skeletons smiled from their perches. The neighbors’ inflatables were thankfully turned off, and our headlights caught a few pumpkins peeking from behind porch railings.
As I tucked my three-year-old into bed, I heard a Great Horned Owl calling in the woods behind us.
The “shivers,” indeed.
