30 Days of Halloween – Halloween Day: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”

I almost plunged into a state of existential despair while writing this, our final 30 Days of Halloween post, because I realized that I can’t remember what my last non-slutty Halloween costume was. I remember my favorite costume as a child, which was Mary, Queen of Scots, in third grade. I remember my college and post-grad costumes, which include slutty Alice in Wonderland, slutty Wonder Woman, slutty Robin, and slutty Princess Peach. Those middle years, though—a blur.

I know that I was a witch sometimes, and another time Stevie Nicks (I mean, she is basically an extension of the witch idea), and I think I tried to be Buffy Summers one year. But what was my final costume, my last idea before I acquiesced to the “You’re a girl, you have to spend $60 on a slutty costume that consists of three straps of fabric” ideology about Halloween? How is it possible that I can’t remember?

Maybe I was too fixated on the candy, making sure my father didn’t steal my Kit Kats and my lollipops, because those were his favorite, and he had no qualms about asserting that fact. Or maybe I was always so busy planning my costume for the next year that I didn’t fixate on what I was actually wearing at the time. Or maybe Halloween wasn’t really about the candy, or even the costumes, or even the trick-or-treating routine—at least, not any of those things as a single, exclusionary element. Maybe it was about the experience as a whole—the creativity required, the reinvention offered, the return to normalcy guaranteed—and how fleeting it was. You can wait desperately for something all year, plan for it and buy your costume and your candy and do all that, and barely 24 hours later, it’s over. Your normal life and your normal life clothes and your normal life eating habits return. But then you start the whole thing all over again, thinking to yourself, “Next year, I’ll do better. Next year will be better. Next year.”

I guess what I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is Halloween is simultaneously thrilling and alluring, and yet also totally comfortable and accepting. Some things change, but not really; more things stay the same. You’re probably buying the same candy year after year. You’re probably staying within the same theme for your costumes; I transitioned from being Goth-obsessed to comics-obsessed, which mirrored my own personality transition over the years. And maybe, just maybe, you’re holding out for the Great Pumpkin to come. Next year, he’ll show next year. Next year.

Which is why, of course, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, should be the only thing you watch today that’s Halloween-themed. Sure, the holiday has over the years been usurped by subpar horror movies like Saw and Paranormal Activity, and skanky costumes that somehow make even inanimate objects like M&M candies and R2-D2 sexually stimulating. But in the Peanuts world, in the perfect little place Charles M. Schulz created for Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Sally and Lucy and Woodstock and Peppermint Patty and Linus—wonderful, trusting Linus—Halloween is about sincerity and faith, about friendship and sentimentality, about a solid refusal to see logic.

Honestly, isn’t Halloween a terribly unreasonable thing? Wasting all that money and all that time for just one night? But Linus, perfect Linus, puts it best in his letter to the Great Pumpkin: “Everyone tells me you are a fake, but I believe in you. P.S.: If you really are a fake, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

Sometimes, you just have to go with a feeling. And if you can’t do that on Halloween, well when can you, goddammit?

Until next year, everyone. We’ll do better next year. Next year.