Halloween Inflation

by Rich Brooks


31 October 2003

Somehow Halloween just seems to get bigger and bigger every year. I can remember when I was growing up, admittedly quite a few years ago and in a much Whiter time, this October holiday was simply a night (usually on "beggar's night," observed a day or two before the official October 31 date) when we kids would dress-up in masks and costumes and solicit contributions to our candy bags from the neighbors on our block. Maybe also a Halloween party at school, as I recall the time in the fifth grade when I dressed up as a blind man with a tin cup selling pencils, and took my blonde Cocker Spaniel to school with me as my "seeing-eye" dog. The PC police would have a field day with that today, but even at that early age I saw the humor in trying to pass off Taffy as a German Shepherd guide-dog.

The trick-or-treat night and a school party was the extent of children's Halloween celebrations, and as for adults? While they might carve a pumpkin and put up a few simple decorations outside the house, I can't recall that any of the adults of my acquaintance, either in my family or otherwise, ever attended a Halloween party. If you watch any televitz sitcom today, however, you would have to conclude that what was once "All Hallows Eve" is now a month-long period of non-stop revelry culminating in the most important holiday of the year. Think the old "Roseanne" show for an example of what I mean. Indeed, Halloween is now a much bigger event than Christmas in many major cities, especially among the de-Christianized and "metrosexual" crowd. There is a large storefront in downtown San Francisco which is leased for three months out of every year and sells nothing but Halloween schlock merchandise. But even the Ridgecrest Senior Citizen Center is having a masquerade ball this year. No, I'm not going, but jezzus, you can't even tune in the Food Network and watch a cooking show during the month of October without a pumpkin recipe. I did, however, enjoy seeing Martha Stewart, with some self-deprecating humor, make herself up as a witch.

Easter, on the other hand, seems to have lost its relative importance in the holiday hierarchy. How did we get to this point, and what forces are responsible for this sea change in popular attitudes? I know what you expect me to say, and I will say it briefly. Jews learned many years ago to exploit Christmas for their department store profits, but it was apparently too unseemly -- even for them -- to do the same with Easter. Halloween, on the other hand, was ripe for exploitation and was a win-win situation for the tribe. Profits from pushing the merchandise, but I think even more important was the subtle undermining of White Christianity. I don't usually like to side with the hard-line fundamentalists, but they tell some truth when they point out the "satanic" origins of that holiday. These points have been made and discussed many times before, so rather than dwelling on and belaboring them some more, I'd like to mention a phenomenon which I think is even more responsible than the jews for this "Halloween inflation."

The biggest reason for Halloween inflation, I believe, lies in the attitude of my generation, the "baby-boomers." While I was born a couple years before the official cutoff date, and can truthfully deny being a baby-boomer, I am at least a "quasi" member of that group because I was raised in the same social environment as those born right after the war. (We've always referred to WWII as simply "the war.") Unlike previous generations which had known economic hardship and the necessity to go to work at an early age, many in my generation have never completely grown up. Life is still a big costume party for this developmentally-arrested "me generation," and Halloween is the perfect expression of their youth-oriented, self-centered ethos. Halloween has become a media-created holiday indistinguishable from the media-created Christmas, and both are a far cry from their original religious and folkish celebrations.

In contrast to the increased merrymaking of adults, I don't think children today have nearly the fun at Halloween that we did as kids. Even in my relatively safe, White, small town neighborhood parents are paranoid (sometimes for good reason) about letting their children go freelance trick-or-treating. I always stock up on plenty of candy, but there have never been more than a half-dozen knocks at the door the past several years. Very bad for my waistline all those leftover Hershey bars are! Like so much else in AmeriKwan society, children's Halloween activities are regimented and programmed into "community" events. Of course we also have the niggers, and by extension the jews, to partially blame for this lack of spontaneity.

So I guess I'm probably a Halloween "Scrooge," but I can remember a time when it was a lot less inflated but also a lot more fun. Fun for kids, that is, which is what it really should be all about. Unless, that is, we are someday able to reestablish the religion of our European roots and return "All Hallows Eve" to its original spiritual significance. In the meantime, Happy Halloween to all White Nationalist VNN readers and a scary fright-night to all jews.

RICH BROOKS

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