How Halloween Left the Farm for the Suburbs

By the third week of October the fields are empty. The corn is down, the pastures are cut flat, and the light comes and goes in a hurry, so that by six the yards are thick with shadow and the houses along the road are lit against it. It is the month of putting things away — apples to the cellar, root vegetables to the sand, the tools to the back wall of the barn. Nothing grows now. The ground is cooling, and the dark comes down on it like a hand closing. Somewhere in that dark is the last night of the month, and the Americans made of it their one feast of endings.

November Eve in a Farm Month

The farm October was a month of leftover time. The hard work of the harvest ran out sometime in the middle of it, and what remained was clean-up and storage. The smell of the month was windfall apples going sweet in the grass and woodsmoke from the kitchen stove. The evenings were long. There was cider going hard in the barrel, and there were people who believed a year that ended badly ought to end with a fire.

Across the water, the last night of October had always been a hinge. It was the eve of a new year in an older calendar, a night when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to thin. People carved faces into root vegetables and set them in the window with a candle stuck inside, to warn off whatever might come looking. In the British Isles the turnip did the work. In America, the turnip was too small and too hard to be worth a knife; the pumpkin — that huge, soft, ridged squash the continent had grown for centuries — was bigger, brighter, and easier by far to gut. The American jack-o'-lantern is the old turnip lantern drawn larger and lit like a small orange moon.

On the farm itself, the holiday belonged to the workers before it belonged to the children. Mischief was the old artisanry of the rural young: gates lifted off their hinges and set against a fence, a wagon wheel loosened, a pig turned out where a pig had no business being. The pranks were not gentle and not truly cruel. They were the last joke of a workforce with nothing to do in the dark, and they knew the land well enough to be carried out without a light. That was the country Halloween — a month's end enforced by the people who had done the month's work.

The Mischief Moves to the Streets

The people who did the farm work eventually left the farms. They went to the cities and, after the war, out to the rings of houses being built around them — the suburbs, with their identical porches and their fresh black asphalt. October followed them. So did the pranks, though the tricks had changed character in a place where there were no outhouses to tip. A window could be soaped. A trash can rolled down a hill. A tree wrapped in paper, hung with it from the power lines like a false snow. The mischief moved onto the grid of streets and streetlights, and there it looked less like folklore and more like vandalism. In town, the farmers' joke was a crime.

The adults answered with organization. If the children were going to roam the streets on the last night of the month, then let the roaming be managed. The costume parade, the school carnival, the gymnasium haunted house, the game with the duck pond and the penny toss — these were the civic version of the old fires. And there was the door-to-door. Going up to a stranger's house and asking for something to eat on November Eve had an old pedigree; the custom of handing out small cakes to the wandering dead had become, in the cities, a custom of handing out sweets to the wandering children, who threatened no harm as long as the sweets came. The porch light became the signal. If it burned, the door would open. If it was dark, the house had taken itself out of the night.

The candy industry understood the month before anyone else did. Candy was cheap, kept well, survived a paper sack swinging on a child's arm for three hours. The makers wrapped their goods in autumn colors, made the pieces smaller and more numerous, and let the season do the selling. By the time the suburban October had its own rituals — the costume bought in a bag instead of made at home, the rubber mask with the elastic strap, the plastic pumpkin bucket — Halloween had become the most commercial holiday in the American year after the ones in December. The farm had given the month its fire. The suburb gave it a system.

The Farm Comes Back as Scenery

Then a strange thing: the farm came back. Not as work. The suburban family that lived in those identical houses had no barns, no fields, no apple cellar, but they had cars, and in October they drove out past the last developments to the farms that had held on. There, on a Saturday in the middle of the month, the old place had been turned into a destination. The pumpkins were laid out in rows for choosing. There was a hayride that went in a large, slow circle over ground that had been cropped a month before. There was a corn maze cut into a field that was itself a kind of joke — a labor that produced nothing but the pleasure of being lost. The farm that had once ended its year in the quiet of storage now ended it with a parking lot full of cars.

The children ran through the maze while the adults stood at the entrance watching the sky turn the color of a penny. The cider was made on the premises or nearby. The pumpkins, chosen with great seriousness, rode home in the back of the car and sat on the front step for two weeks, changing color slowly, dimming from orange to a bruised gold, until the last night of the month. Then they were carved. One face each, tended to with the wrong kind of knife, the seeds scraped out and saved or thrown into the grass.

The suburb cannot grow a harvest, so it buys one. The October trip to the pumpkin patch is the one remaining farm chore in the suburban calendar, and it is a chore performed as a pleasure. The children will not remember the field. They will remember the ride, the mud on their boots, the size of the thing they were allowed to carry. The farm, in October, plays the part of October. That is enough.

The One Night the Doors Are Open

On the last evening of the month the suburb changes its posture. All year the front yard has been a display — the lawn mown to stripes, the shrubs trimmed, the house turned inward toward the family room at the back. The front door is a formality. Nobody uses it. But on the thirty-first the porch light goes on, the door opens, and the front step becomes a stage. The adults stand at the end of the driveway in coats, holding flashlights, watching the street. The children move in a loose pack, crossing from one pool of light to the next. The houses that have gone dark are skipped without discussion. The houses that are lit take part.

The jack-o'-lantern sits on the step, facing the street. In the old country the carved face was set in the window facing outward, meant to warn away the traveling dead. In the suburb it advertises the house as open for business, a face of welcome lit from within. The old function is gone, replaced by a transaction: face visible, treat available. The dead do not walk the sidewalk. The children do, and the adults walk behind them with the flashlights, and the bags fill with the small wrapped things the candy companies have spent all month manufacturing for precisely this.

What remains of the farm is the month itself. The cold coming down after sundown. The smell of woodsmoke and windfall apples. The moon, when it is full, doing its old work over the rooftops. Halloween is October's one loud night, and when it is over the month turns the year over, gently, into the long quiet of November. The porch lights go out. The doors close. The jack-o'-lanterns sit on the steps for a few more days, softening, drawing the last of the light out of the air, until somebody with no more patience for the sight of it carries the collapsed face to the bin. The harvest is over. The suburb goes dark and warm. The calendar has turned. That is October in America: the month the dead come visiting, and the neighbors answer.