In a few days, Halloween arrives in Santa Barbara with all the menace of a Labradoodle wearing fairy wings.
At first, there are only a few signs. A plastic skeleton appears on a porch in San Roque. Cobwebs materialize in hedges along the Mesa. Pumpkins begin gathering in doorways as if attending quiet neighborhood meetings.
Then suddenly, children are everywhere.
Pirates. Princesses. Astronauts. Ninjas.
Last year I encountered a 4-year-old traffic cone.
I have no idea what existential crisis led to that decision, but the child seemed fully committed to it.
Halloween is supposedly our annual celebration of fear, but I have never quite believed that.
Fear is trying to find parking at Trader Joe’s on De la Vina Street on a Saturday afternoon.
Fear is sending a text message to your grandchildren and ending it with an accidental thumbs-up emoji that somehow conveys disappointment, confusion and passive aggression all at once.
Fear is looking at your retirement account after a volatile week.
A child dressed as Spider-Man asking for a Snickers bar does not make the list.
No, Halloween is really about imagination.
Which may explain why adults are increasingly involved.
Children wear costumes to become someone else. Adults wear costumes to become who they suspect they might have been.
The little pirate dreams of adventure.
The middle-aged man dressed as a cowboy may secretly dream of solving life’s problems with a horse and a horizon.
The woman dressed as a flapper isn’t interested in Prohibition-era economics. She simply wants an evening in which nobody asks her to remember another password.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the holiday’s underlying wisdom.
Thousands of years ago the Celts believed the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin for one night each year. People wore disguises to confuse wandering spirits.
It’s a wonderfully optimistic strategy.
Imagine confronting the forces of darkness with what amounts to a fake mustache and a different hat.
Yet we still do it.
We put on masks. We become superheroes. We become villains. We become giant avocados.
And somehow we feel a little braver.
Santa Barbara, naturally, celebrates Halloween in its own style.
The palm trees never seem entirely convinced.
The ocean breeze immediately rearranges every carefully positioned decoration.
The neighborhoods fill with families moving at roughly the same pace as a wine tour.
Nobody appears to be rushing anywhere.
Even the ghosts seem relaxed.
After all, if you’ve been haunting a property with ocean views for a hundred years, what exactly is there to complain about?
The businesses join the fun as well. Baristas arrive dressed as coffee drinks. Hardware store employees become tools.
And somewhere in Santa Barbara, a librarian patiently explains an exceptionally intellectual costume.
“I am the Dewey Decimal System.”
Everyone nods respectfully. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know whether that’s a costume or a diagnosis.
The costumes themselves tell us something about who we are.
Vampires, zombies and werewolves are simply old anxieties in better outfits.
Celebrity costumes reveal our aspirations.
And the inflatable dinosaur, now apparently a permanent feature of American culture, reminds us that civilization remains delightfully fragile.
Children understand all of this instinctively.
To them, becoming a princess or a pirate isn’t deception. It’s exploration.
For one evening they get to try on courage. Or confidence. Or adventure. Or wings.
As I grow older, I’ve begun to suspect that many adults miss Halloween for the wrong reasons.
We think we’ve outgrown costumes.
What we’ve really outgrown is permission.
Permission to be ridiculous. Permission to experiment. Permission to imagine ourselves a little differently than we did yesterday.
Children don’t need Halloween to grant them that freedom. Adults sometimes do.
Somewhere along the line, we decide that seriousness is the same thing as maturity.
Halloween gently suggests otherwise.
It reminds us that play is not the opposite of wisdom.
It may be one of its ingredients.
So this Halloween I’ll take my usual position on the porch, bowl of candy in hand, serving as a minor civic official in the annual Department of Chocolate Distribution.
Small superheroes will arrive.
Tiny witches.
Several creatures from movies I have never seen.
One child will inevitably appear dressed as something that requires an explanation from a parent.
And I will admire them all.
Because beneath the costumes lies a lovely truth.
Every one of us carries around more possibilities than we usually admit.
Some brave. Some ridiculous. Some assembled 10 minutes before leaving the house.
Halloween gives us permission to see them.
And perhaps that’s why we still need it.
For one sweet October evening, we remember that growing older is not the same thing as growing predictable.
The world asks us, every day, to be practical, efficient and sensible.
Halloween asks us to be imaginative. To play. To wonder. To believe, if only for an hour or two, that we might yet become somebody new.
That’s a kind of magic worth holding onto. And, at the very least, they are considerably more pleasant to watch.
