Sometimes I just want to give in and let my kids join the 'fun', and then I look at what 12 year old's do for Halloween, what 16 year old's do, what 18 year old's do...and it worries me. Then I think about how different Halloween was just ten years ago, what's it going to be like ten years from now? What am I leading my children towards?
The struggle that I have is that I enjoy fantasy and imagination, I like stories and fancy dress parties. There's just something about Halloween, it's invented, nobody really knows the point, it's mostly a means to selling product or media, and surely those producers year on year will continue to compete, out-do each other with the next most radical, boundary pushing concepts in horror and what's acceptable. What is Halloween exactly? I don't mean historically, I mean now.
The worst kinds of baddies are definitely getting cooler, and there's no doubt in my mind that more and more young people are being heavily influenced into horrific behaviour by a world which clamours for their attention with bad information. I think the fundamental problem is that we are all quite naive, we genuinely believe that we are open-minded free-thinkers who are not influenced by our environment and what information we ingest, and that we are wholly capable of objectively digesting and processing what we encounter, without realising to what extent we are all products of our environment and upbringing. That requires humility, and I don't see much humility around today.
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