When I was about nine years old, my family moved from a small, rural town in Massachusetts to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. As you might expect, that was quite a culture shock for a young American kid. I’ll probably write a post about my time overseas one of these days. But there’s one aspect of that experience in particular on my mind: Halloween.
Living in a majority-Muslim country comes with unique challenges. Your access to pork products is extremely limited. Alcohol is out of the question. And Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas cannot be celebrated openly in public. Halloween, however, could be celebrated openly! My family often got the impression that Arabs found the whole affair funny. And believe it or not, even in Saudi Arabia, we had trick-or-treating!
Dhahran looks and feels like an alien abducted a suburban Arizona town and dropped it in the Middle East. Although the city has continued to evolve over the years, not much has changed in that regard. If you’d like a visual example, someone recorded a liesurely drive through Dhahran’s “Main Camp” area.
Now imagine those streets at night on Halloween. In the 80s, we Gen X kids walked from house to house and trick-or-treated much as we would’ve in the United States. Only I’m originally from a very rural community, and back in the 80s, there really wasn’t anywhere TO trick-or-treat in my neck of the woods. At the time, my home town was so small that it technically qualified as a village. So the whole phenomenon was new and amazing to me as a nine-year-old. Ironically, I didn’t get to experience that part of American culture firsthand until I left the country.
This holiday has always held a special place in my heart, and it always will. So to this day, I have traditions of my own. One of them is watching a horror movie each day in October all the way through Halloween. Another one is carving a jack-o’-lantern and keeping it lit until morning the next day. As I write this, it’s October 30th, 2023. Just one more day until Halloween. I’ve kept pace with my movie viewing schedule — and sometimes exceeded it. And tonight I carved my jack-o’-lantern.
Tomorrow, I’ll hand out candy to the neighborhood kids. When you’re an adult, your relationship with Halloween changes. It’s your turn to “pay it forward” for all the kids enjoying their own door-to-door adventures. With everything that’s happening in the world right now, I’m more than happy to bring some fun darkness into people’s lives.
Happy Halloween, folks! Enjoy yourselves… but don’t linger in the shadows too long.
