Taking a look at the possibility that little ghosts and goblins will be stuck at home to watch TV come this Halloween season.
In an era when historic monuments or even subway stations are potentially being name-changed because of an overall sense of sensitivity and a sudden call for change, I’d say that perhaps anything is possible. Local montrealers are trying to have the name of Lionel-Groulx metro station changed and named for a famed jazz musician. Thoughts on that: If we still don’t have a Mordecai Richler metro station, or perhaps a Leonard Cohen metro station, then maybe we should leave well enough alone … all this change seems to be rubbing some the wrong way; besides, we didn’t get to change the names of things in the nineties simply because they were uncomfortable. We’re sure the Anglo community of Montréal at that time would have liked to change a lot during the referendum of the mid-nineties or perhaps at the height of the FLQ shenanigans.
I understand their plight, but to change history is wrong, as I’ve stated before…it simply sends the wrong message to the oppressors. It’s the wrong way to go about change.
Canceling Halloween
And just as bad would perhaps be to cancel or postpone Halloween in the face of adversity. There must be something we could do instead of cancelling the holiday that’ll protect children but still somehow keep it all alive … the spirit of it that is.
But what of Halloween? Last year, the Holiday was cancelled due to a rainstorm … a RAINSTORM! Not a snowstorm, Valerie Plante seeing fit to postpone the event.
It seems in all likelihood that the event or rather the Holiday would be cancelled this year. After all, there is no way to police each individual household to see if they are following the rules in handing out their candy; even if you had to return home and wash each individual morsel of candy each child brings home, we’d say that that would take a long time indeed.
Alternatives
Perhaps the event can still go on, but instead of handing out and/or collecting candy, it should be a simple walk, walking through the streets admiring the decorations that neighbors put up. Maybe each household should give it a bit more this year and decorate in order to honor the holiday and the kids. After having a pretty horrible time cooped up at home, it would do the kids good to get out there and get swallowed up by all the ghosts, goblins, vampires, zombies and essentially the spirit of the whole thing.
The candy situation seems a pretty difficult dilemma to get around, but maybe there’s an option for that as well.
But seeing that last year, the Holiday was postponed by the mayor of Montréal, we’d say it’s safe to assume this would happen again this year, but really, it’s surely a tossup, as kids are being sent back to school, and if you ask me, with some pretty lax rules for mask-wearing overall.
An Historic Night
There are certainly many out there that have a lot of respect and adoration for this holiday. As a writer, and a writer of some Horror content, I can definitely see the importance of the holiday itself, as stories sold during this season primarily market themselves.
In the end, it’s perhaps sad, more than anything else, as in the end, it’ll be the children that’ll be missing out. As a child of the nineties, I can remember that the problems that affected the world were grown-up problems, and we still had the safety and comforts we were used to, but today, it seems that the problems that affect the adults seem to be affecting the children even more.
Because come the fall, it’ll be the children sitting in classrooms with no masks, dealing with all the changes set up and presented to them, and it’ll be the children that’ll miss out on tradition and have to sit home and watch old movies like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday The 13th just to try and keep the spirit of Halloween alive—then again, maybe that’ll just be the case for me.
