Trick or treat
Smell my feet
Give me something good to eat
If you don’t
I don’t care
I’ll pull down your underwear

I remember bouncing a basketball on fallen oak leaves to the rhythm of this vulgar little chant, out of the earshot of my mother, who deemed it “fresh.” Why did we recite it to ourselves, over and over, in the weeks leading up to Halloween? Surely, we knew as well as anyone that when the time came to mount the stairs, the most we’d muster was a dutiful, singsong “trick or treat,” perhaps a mumbled explanation of our costumes, and finally a hurried thank you.

Maybe it was simply the felt aggression of the ritual working itself out. People in masks, entering strangers’ property by night, demanding things – even in cozy and wholesome contexts, it’s an image that never quite loses its bite, never quite quells the faint flutterings of other possibilities. Young people prowling the streets after dark – sometimes I am, at least for an instant, a little wary of coming across a group of them walking alone at night, often with a thread of tenderness wrapped around the coiled spring of self-preservatory instinct. I remember you, I think. You are so strong and so lovable and so stupid. You have no idea how easily you could wreck your life and my life and both of our mothers’ lives.

When you trick-or-treat, you play the goblin. But the ritual has its bass notes of fear for you as well. The dependency of children – having to ask for everything you want, without status of your own, in a social nexus whose rules and graces you probably have not mastered. The terror of the unknown house – the stories about people who seek out children, who take them away from the people who love them, for their own dark purposes. Stranger danger. And then, for the kid who is reaching the end of his Halloween tenure, moving from an adorable child to a more ambiguous youth: feeling too old for this and too young for everything else, less welcomed, more evaluated, often masking, if well brought up, a feeling of essential clownishness with good manners; needing to be capable of more than he is yet. Masks terrify; masks protect.

Of course, Halloween is not this serious. Halloween is fun! Halloween is some of the most fun I remember having as a child. But part of what makes it fun is this dim outline of a troubled and shadowy horizon that, when approached, breaks into a hundred points of candlelight.

What makes Halloween Halloween is the meeting of strangers, the mutually obligated social exchange that can be choreographed but not auditioned or rehearsed. There are not many of these opportunities for adults. There are fewer for children.

There are so few opportunities, too, for children to experience that up-late-on-school-night thrill, the sense of being let out on the town. The public street is, for many children, the artery that carries them from home to school and from school to organized sports and afterschool activities and from afterschool activities back to their homes. But once in a while, is it a place for them to explore, to plot routes and wander. Once in a while, it is a place for revelry and joy. Parents worry, with unfortunate cause, that they risk someone calling Child Protective Services if they let their children wander. But we still have Halloween.

When Halloween sparks overt fears, it is usually on behalf of children. People are putting razorblades into Kit-Kat bars, devil worshippers are luring children into a web of occult activity, et cetera. But at its inarticulate root some of the Halloween anxiety is about fear of the young, not fear on their behalf. Children en masse, uncontrolled, with that enormous capacity for activity and that still developing, often somewhat unbalanced moral instinct: it’s the lunatics running the asylum. The fear of those dern kids running wild is probably perennial, and to differing degrees at various times, more and less reasonable. But ever since Covid (and its months-long shutdown of schools, community centers, et cetera) we seem to be in a period of heightened generational tension. Teenagers I know were recently asked, without offering any provocation beyond yapping and giggling like the teenage girls they are, to leave a 7-Eleven. Shopping malls have barred or set specific hours for unaccompanied minors. Resort towns like Wildwood, New Jersey, have set curfews for those under eighteen.

These are not entirely unreasonable responses. Teens are acting out of pocket. The inwardness and passivity of the proverbial screenager seem to be locked in an alternating pattern with outbursts of antisocial action. Teenagers are overall very sedate: they drink less and screw around less than previous cohorts, which would be an unqualified good if not for the worry that they are not so much behaving well as failing to behave in any particular way at all. And then some of them are aggressively destructive: they organize flash mob riots on social media; they congregate in groups on dirt bikes, stunting at great risk to themselves and other drivers; they rob stores and break windows. This is, all things considered, cheering insofar as it is a sign of life asserting itself. But a fever is a sign of life asserting itself; this does not mean it is sustainable.

Something has broken down in the way we socialize adolescents: in the way we integrate them into our shared life, in the way we regulate and reward the drive for action, in the way we rule them while they need rule, in the way we prepare them for adulthood and honor its blossoming. Fear of the young and the trouble they bring is not a groundless neurosis. But shutting them out of more and more public spaces purchases a short-term solution at the probable expense of the long-term dynamic.

I do not know what the solution is, or if there is a single solution. I know it is not Halloween. By the time most children enter their trouble years, they have aged out of Halloween. Which, since it is an informal social custom, is probably unalterable – and also a shame. It would be good if there were a universal yearly festival where teens were expected to be out on the public street, self-directing, creative, bold, and impudent – but also required to interact with a wide cross-section of their neighbors and bound by politeness in the interaction.

In the meantime, Halloween remains a yearly tribute to the possibility of happy endings to fraught encounters: neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger, young to old. The group of rowdy teenagers blocking your path politely step aside, the horrible goblin mask opens a polite conversation under a porch light. The shadows become a Jack-o’-lantern, the homeowner becomes a host, and year by year, bittersweet, a trick of a treat: the children grow up.