Absolutely All Hallows’ Eve

Halloween is a strange holiday for a lot of reasons. One of the oddest is the many ways you can celebrate it. Compare it to Christmas, say. With Christmas, you can take your festivities and decorations in essentially two directions: hokey, or religious. Okay, you can try to be classy and elegant, but that just looks hokey, but expensively so.

Most holidays are similar, with a dichotomy of directions:

• Easter: cutesy vs. religious
• Thanksgiving : vaguely-religious vs. just-here-for-the-food
• Canada Day/Independence Day: “I wish I could be this patriotic all year round” vs. “I wish I could shoot off fireworks all year round”

But then Halloween offers you several choices:

Darkness vs. General pretending

Halloween is generally about spooky-scary stuff, but it can be about just generally pretending to be something you aren’t. As I mentioned in a previous post, Halloween’s vague requirement for scariness seemed a little restrictive as a child, at least when compared to the usual freedom kids are given to pretend. And a lot of adults want to throw off the oppressive sorta-scary-requirement. Maybe they want to return to the childhood freedom to make-believe. Maybe they find the adult world scary enough. Though many seem like they’re using their Halloween costume to push something about their personality, like, “Look everyone, I’m really funny and playful! I must be if I’m a 300-lb bearded man in a princess costume!” Or, “I must be cool, I’m dressed as a meme I saw last week!”

And of course, the pop culture-industrial complex gets involved too: lots of people just want to dress as the latest thing, and lots of companies are here to enable you. So that's how there will be countless Barbies this Halloween. (And I'm assuming, a small number of ironic Oppenheimers.) But on the scare scale, she doesn't register. Ironically, you'd be better off going with Oppenheimer for that.

Traditionally Occult vs. Genuine Horror

What's especially weird is that a lot of the scary aspects of Halloween aren't actually scary. Witches, Frankenstein-esque monsters, and sheet-based ghosts have long since ceased to be scary in our society. But there are still many genuinely scary things. Or at least, gory things. So you have some people being "scary" with symbolically scary things, or you can actually scare people. That’s made worse by the fact that “scary” is another one of those concepts where we vary wildly as a society. If slasher pics are your comfort zone, then your Halloween lawn display may worry your neighbour who went back to their tent before the campfire stories started.

Disturbingly Realistic vs. Comfortably Fake

If you’re staying on the traditional side, you can dial-up the authenticity to suit your tastes. It’s easy to find adorable little witch and ghost decorations that are about as threatening as your average Christmas decorations, or you can go for some more authentic darkness. And that goes if your idea of “authentic darkness” means Wicca or Bauhaus. It may not scare anyone, but it will have your friends asking if you actually practice this year-round and only come into the open during this one time that it’s socially acceptable.

But surprisingly, even if you’re on the horrific side, there's also an option for hokey, but gory: if you go to the dollar store, you can find bloody severed limbs that look incredibly fake. I'm struggling to understand the mentality behind that: you want to imply tremendous horror, but god forbid it should be realistic. I think the idea is to aim for a humourously over-the-top gruesome display. But as with so many attempts to be ironically excessive today, no one can agree on what is excessive.

Child vs. Adult

Halloween is a holiday centred around horror and children - which is a weird combo to begin with - but it begs the question: just how scary are we supposed to make it? On the one hand, a scare that an adult can withstand is probably not something you want to subject your kids to. And on the other hand, kids don’t always know what they’re supposed to be scared of; the whole world is new and strange to them, it’s all kind of scary. Getting ushered around the neighbourhood to get food they don’t know from people they’ve never met is pretty scary to them. The costumes and decorations don’t really make a difference.

And then there’s the issue that Halloween costumes for adults — at least, adult women — have fallen into a rut of being sexy-whatever. On the one hand, that's a funny commentary on humanity: as a child, everything is scary, but as an adult, everything is sexualized. On the other, it’s further pushing us towards our having two Halloweens: one for kids and one for adults.

What's really weird is that these different aspects of Halloween don't really conflict with each other. While the religious and secular Christmases stay at arm's length, everyone seems okay with mixing Halloweens. So it's like, "You'll have a terror-ific time watching the Paw Patrol Halloween Special!"

How The Meaty Have Fallen

Years ago, I wrote a post about how many ads use “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers. The point was that it’s really over-used, and worse, lazily used — by advertisers looking for a cheap expression of … I don’t know, individuality, or something? I was pointing out that it just keeps getting warmed-over by the ad industry, despite it already being associated with the last second-rate brand that used it, and also, in complete obliviousness to how cliched it is. 

(After the recent passing of Rudolph Isley, I should point out that I have nothing against the song itself, but it’s become generic ad music, about as fresh as 70s Muzak.)

So I was absolutely shocked when I saw McDonald’s latest ad campaign built around that most over-used song. It might not be a surprise for younger people: Today, McDonald’s is just another established brand casting about for something that will appeal to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. (Seriously, that’s what they’re calling it.) 

But when I was younger, Mickey-D’s were legendary for their marketing prowess. Among anyone with the self-awareness to realize that marketing was happening, they were the epitome of corporate Svengalis making the public dance to their choice of tune. Children loved them. Teens loved them even though children loved them. Parents hated them but let their children drag them there anyway.

To be honest, I always thought the legend of their gastronomic propaganda was a little exaggerated. After all, if they could control the general public’s tastes, wouldn’t they choose something easier to make than burgers? I mean, they are a fairly complex food; they do have all the food groups one way or another. Wouldn’t it be more profitable to command everyone to desire raw soy beans or something?

But even if they were never a burger collective controlling the American palate, they were the pinnacle of twentieth-century marketing. Yes, they had missteps like the Arch Deluxe or their foray into Pizza. But on the other hand, they built an empire with a clown and a big purple lump, convinced kids to have their birthdays there, got us to drink some kind of orange syrup at public events, made the McRib into a major event, and made a legend out of a burger that’s half-bread and has an unclassifiable-sauce.

So it was a shock to see them build an ad campaign around this cliched song that a regional chain of muffler shops would be embarrassed to use. On the one hand, it’s kind of refreshing; instead of marketing going after the youths, here they’re going after, I don’t know, the Boomers, I guess? But it’s also a bit sad. It’s like a TV show that came back for one season too many, an aging rock star dabbling in smooth jazz, or an athlete that doesn’t know when to quit. Wow, I saw communism fall, and somehow the fall of McDonald’s marketing is more shocking.

Swilce? Tayvis? Traylor?

I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce, star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. You probably have heard this, because it’s created a perfect storm of American popular culture, combining the hype of football and the ubiquity of pop music. The Yin and Yang of American culture have been suddenly pushed together, and both sides are acting kind of awkward. 

As someone who watches football, but shies away from popular music, I’m only seeing part of it. But the football half is pretty embarrassing. On the one hand, a lot of people want to talk about it, but aren’t really sure how, so they just make a lot of bad puns on Swift’s songs. And that got old really fast. I don’t know if something similar is going on in the pop world. Oh God, I just realized, they must be making endless “tight end” jokes. My condolences.

It’s also embarrassing the way the football world is acting like a nerdy kid who gets a chance to sit at the cool kids’ table. That’s a bit surprising, given the grip that football seems to have on American culture. But even football has room to grow, and suddenly getting exposure with a young and female demographic has them seeing dollar signs. So now the NFL is passing notes in class asking if the cool kids have said anything about it.

But more than anything, this incident shows how we, as a society, still haven’t figured out how to handle the current culture. The celebrity industry wants to make this the story of the century, but many of us have got the message that obsessing over people we don't know is a bad idea, even when we are fans of them. The fact is, there isn’t much for any of us to say about two people dating, when we personally don’t know either one. Whether you’re a fan of one or both or neither, there’s not much of a reaction you can have, other than wishing them luck. Again, the football world is demonstrating this well, with football analysts suddenly being asked to say something about the couple, but not really having anything to add, and instead just making the umpteenth "Blank Space" joke.

Part of the problem is that we just don't have universal touchstones in society anymore. There are few things that everyone cares about, but the media keeps excitedly hoping it will find one. Even Swift on her own is a good example of it. Her fame has reached a level where the media is assuming she is a universal obsession. But we don't really have universal obsessions in a world where we're so free to choose our personal culture. The most anyone can hope for is fandom from a dedicated and large minority, like Swift has. (Or, for that matter, football has.) But that still means that most people don't have a strong connection. So although you’ll see some examples of fans crossing over into both cultural worlds — like those who famously flooded retailers with orders for Kelce’s jersey — more people are just aggravated with the expectations to suddenly care about the other side of American culture.