HALLOWEEN and the RELUCTANT NEWTOWN, PA. WITCH

That tiresome holiday, Halloween, is approaching again. Halloween is a child’s idea of what is scary, and it will be shoved in our faces on every door and lamppost in the city. As a young boy, I knew that a screaming face with bloodshot eyes is not scary; that a witch’s face with whiskers and warts on her chin is not scary, and that hanging miniature skeletons on your front door is anything but scary. What is really scary would be prohibited from public display: Photos of late-term abortions, murder victims from police files or decapitation scenes from the Middle East. These images constitute real horror – or the real Halloween we live with all year long. This is why we no longer need Halloween: We’ve seen witches at work in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy; we’ve seen ghouls in Palestinian scarves and head coverings turn Dilworth Plaza around City Hall into a den of horror; we’ve heard shrieks from the ghouls who protest ICE or who climb on rooftops to assassinate spiritual prophets like Charlie Kirk. The disease of Leftism is the world’s ‘forever’ Halloween: Young women walking around town with their boobs hanging out. Sloppily dressed men in t-shirts and baseball hats; yes, it’s always the baseball cap, old or young, unimaginative Philly men have become slaves to baseball cap wonkery.

There was a time when I was a fan of Halloween, but no more. As leftist activists used to say, “the personal is political.” This quote led me to a Copilot search that revealed that Democrats show a modestly higher preference for Halloween than Republicans — 32% of Democrats say they like Halloween more than the Fourth of July, compared to 15% of Republicans. Additionally, a YouGov America survey found that about one in four U.S. adults say Halloween is one of their favorite holidays. While overall popularity is similar across party lines, there is a stark partisan difference when comparing Halloween to the Fourth of July: 32% of Democrats prefer Halloween over the Fourth of July. 15% of Republicans prefer Halloween over the Fourth of July. No big surprise, really. Back in 2008, ‘Barack-O’-lanterns’ spiced up Democrats’ Halloween. This was the year when Obama and John McCain masks, and even Sarah Palin masks, were popular. I recall the big witches’ hat a 70-something Democrat female friend of mine wore when she hosted a Halloween party in her home in Bucks County several years ago. While the costume itself was out of central casting, the scene unraveled into the absurd when my friend was photographed over her stove stirring a stew of pretend victuals: bat’s heads, chicken hearts, and bull’s balls. When the photographer asked her to smile, she let out a series of Kamala Harris-like cackles. It was neither funny nor scary. As the host of this suburban Halloween party, she was playing a part. I was also playing my part because I was pretending to be amused because she was a friend of mine – although within ten months she would turn into a real witch and end the friendship I thought was lifelong. Yes, I was in for a real shock when her fanatically woke Democrat husband got her to defriend me in every way.

For some reason, the silly Halloween party was her idea of fun; she had talked about the event for months: how she would lead her photography group, all of them in costume, around the neighborhood with everybody in the end winding up at her house, watching her make the victual stew that really contained meat balls. When adults do Halloween like this, the “fun” is forced like a bowel movement with laxatives. As columnist Dave Infante noted, “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Halloween, and adults.” Years ago, I wrote a piece for the Huff Post on Henri David, Philadelphia’s “Mr. Halloween,” and the history of his annual Halloween ball: Henri’s house has the air of ruined aristocracy. In fact, you expect Madame Blavatsky and her crystal ball to walk in at any moment and take a seat. Forty-five years ago, Henri David, or Mr. Halloween, was a bearded, long-haired hippie who liked to hang out with female impersonators. The impersonators took him under their wing and brought him to New York City, where they showed him auditorium-sized drag balls. There were no large-scale drag balls like this in Philadelphia. Worse, when Halloween came around, there were only private Philadelphia house parties and bars to frequent, but no glamorous Halloween balls. The year 1968 was when Henri, all dressed up for Halloween but with no place to go, decided that it was time to do something big on his own. He wanted to start his own Halloween ball tradition, so he went to the Philadelphia Hotel at Broad and Race Streets and initiated the first big city ball. He printed flyers and pasted them himself to poles all over the city, in stark contrast to then-popular counterculture posters calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. He had no money but still managed to pull it off.

I’d attend Henri’s annual Halloween balls every year with a friend who made me promise I would never scratch his name from my plus-one list. That friend, a Halloween super-fanatic, would ask me months in advance if I was going to the ball, but one year when I couldn’t attend (and told him so), he went as me and gave my name at the door. He managed to get in, but the charade did not escape Henri’s expert eyes who let me know later what had occurred. His sneaky antics didn’t help our friendship, but that’s another story. By that point, Henri’s Halloween balls had gotten so large it was hard to move in the grand assembly rooms of the various Sheraton hotels where he held them. Uncomfortably crowded, doesn’t even begin to describe the pushing and shoving and lack of breathing room those hundreds of people in costume generated. Something unpleasant happens when you join multitudes of people in costume. There are just too many costumes for any one costume to stand out. Your costume and everyone else’s begin to seem redundant and unexciting. It’s when the person dressed up in only a simple eye patch becomes a fascinating winner. Feeding these Halloween revelers was also an issue. Hot dogs went for six dollars apiece. My friend would come to the ball with a bottle of vodka stashed under his sweater: “No way am I paying those drink prices,” he’d exclaim. I’d always leave Henri’s balls early, disappointed once again in the false promises of Halloween, and a ball that was supposed to bring an element of fantasy into your life but that always left you feeling more than empty and wanting to run away from the silliness of it all. Thom Nickels