Why Australia needs to start celebrating Halloween

As someone who has always been known among family and friends as Christmas’ biggest fan, it takes a lot of courage to say what I am about to tell you all, but here goes: I think Halloween is now my favourite holiday.

This has traditionally been, at least until recently, not a very “Australian” thing to say. For years, Aussies have thought of Halloween (mistakenly, I might add) as just another US import, like McMuffins and pronouncing data “date-ah”.

But as the price of carving pumpkins has fallen from $30 per kilogram to $3, so, too has Australians’ aversion to all things spooky. Well, kinda, and I say “kinda” because Australians – with some exceptions – still seem to be dragging their collective feet when it comes to actively celebrating Halloween.

Last year my friend and I put together an admirably creepy array of decorations, including polystyrene crows with red light-up eyes, in her front yard, yet were visited by only a dozen trick-or-treaters.

As we shuffled back inside around 10pm, accepting that there would be no more callers, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of homesickness for my former adopted home. You see, one of the things you learn to love when you live in America is the heart-warming anarchy of any given neighbourhood on the evening of October 31.

On All Hallows’ Eve, it’s as though America becomes the best version of itself. It’s a world where a dude dressed as Michael Myers can leap out from behind a rose bush, brandishing a giant carving knife, and make the young family who just knocked on the door scream until they all collapse in giggles.

See, this is how you “celebrate” Halloween: you dress up and you scare the ever-living crap out of each other, and everyone wanders around the streets until well after bedtime, and it’s the best thing on earth.

In 2013, a friend and I visited a legendary haunted house that an East Los Angeles resident had been putting on, in his backyard, for decades; each year he expanded and improved it. He does this for no other reason than to bring joy to the neighbourhood.

In the same way that certain streets and cul-de-sacs in Australia will put on newsworthy Christmas displays, Americans go bananas with their Halloween displays, from spooky front-lawn dioramas right through to professional-quality haunted houses. In San Diego’s University Heights neighbourhood, a half-mile stretch of Maryland Street becomes a tribute to Halloween that was so all-encompassing that by the time I visited, in 2014, and saw the singing animatronic pumpkins, I burst into tears of joy.

This is, to me, the true meaning of Halloween: it’s not about the candy, or who can come up with the funniest spooky pun for their Twitter username, or which “sexy” costume is the most inappropriate, but rather the simple joys of community. This is the part of Halloween I wish my neighbours and countrymen would “get”.

As costume parties are the great social leveller, so too is Halloween a nearly magical way for neighbours to spend time together; everybody looks like a ding dong and we do it just to put smiles on the faces of little kids in costumes. Couple that with the much-needed catharsis of potentially being scared shitless by someone dressed as an undead Donald Trump (etc) and Halloween has tangible emotional benefits, too.

Come Monday, I will don my costume and head out and about, and I will hopefully run into some fellow revellers, but I’m not holding my breath for a massive turnout. Since I am also a card-carrying December 25th nut, at least I know in advance what I’ll ask for Christmas this year: an even bigger, better Halloween in 2017.