HALLOWEEN
Daily Telegraph - November 2007

As a child, America seemed to me a strange and magical place, a land where children were allowed to go to the mall on their own, schools provided delicacies like pizza and chocolate milk on segmented plastic lunch trays and the yellow school bus picked you up outside your home.

In this fantasy of America (actually, a lot of it was surprisingly accurate - the biggest shock to the new visitor to America being not how much it's not like the movies but how much it is), the primary image was of Halloween.

That there existed a day once a year when you could knock on anybody's door and they had to give you lollies was beyond even my greediest fantasies. When I grew up I vowed I would move to America, land of free lollies.

Over the years, the lure of lollies gave way to that of beer, and the novelty of walking the streets after dark morphed into a mere drunken necessity.

In this time my attitude to Halloween hardened. So much so that when, a few years ago, a pioneering gang of teenage trick-or-treaters toilet-papered our house after we refused to give them anything and my mother threw a pot plant at them, screaming, “This is not America!” I could only support her stance.

Halloween, in my books, was a step too far. I'm only 30, yet even I can remember a time when a muffin was thin and hard and never preceded by the adjective “English”; when “apartment living” was done in a flat, and our kids weren't fat whingers and thought not having a TV in their bedroom was a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

I have no objections to American pop culture, per se, but adopting Halloween over, say, Orthodox Easter or Glorious Birthday of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung seemed not only arbitrary but the final nail in the coffin of childhood obesity.

So, when a group of kids showed up at my place on Wednesday night, I was prepared to give them the bah-humbug routine.

Standing in the door with their bags held open they looked very forlorn, which they had a right to be.

This being the inner-west they had only managed to score a few Greens how-to-vote cards, a couple of ecstasy pills and some cinnamon joss sticks.

Melting before their wide-eyed hopefulness, I retrieved some lead-based Chinese cola lollies from the back of the cupboard and began to distribute them. The reaction was overwhelming.

“Cooool,” they cried, their little faces beaming in what appeared to be genuine joy.

Searching for traces of sarcasm, I found none, and gave them another lolly for the hell of it, realising in that moment this was the Halloween I had always dreamed of.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008