There is a costume hanging on the back of my closet door, and it is not good. It is the kind of costume that requires confidence, a sense of humor, and possibly a backup plan involving a black hoodie. This week, we are going to a Halloween party, and I am absurdly excited about it—not ironic-excited, not “I’ll go for an hour” excited, but genuinely, childishly excited. The kind of excited that makes me check the weather, rehearse bad jokes, and wonder whether I can still pull off eyeliner without looking like a raccoon who lost a fight with a yard sale.
It reminds me of being a kid, which is probably the point. When I was young, Halloween began in September with a catalog and ended with a pillowcase full of candy. But the real soundtrack of the season was television. Beetlejuice was on after school—the animated series, all green hair and gravelly voice and gleeful gross-out humor. I did not know then that he was a cartoon spun off from a Tim Burton movie, or that “the ghost with the most” was a piece of pop-culture mischief with a surprisingly long afterlife. I only knew that he was weird, funny, and slightly disgusting, and that he made the ordinary afternoon feel like it had a trapdoor in it. He said “It’s showtime!” and the world became a little less boring.
That is what Halloween does, too. It opens a trapdoor. For one night, the neighborhood’s ordinary rules are suspended. You can be a ghost, a goblin, a ninja, a tube of toothpaste, a haunted Victorian child, or a person who simply wears a striped shirt and claims to be “a burglar on vacation.” You can knock on strangers’ doors and expect generosity. You can scream and then laugh. You can be weird in public, and the public is expected to play along.
Now I am an adult with a calendar, a mortgage, and strong opinions about candy corn. Halloween could easily be just another obligation—another thing to buy, another event to attend, another set of photos to post. There is a version of Halloween that is all pressure and no play: $80 costumes, giant skeletons, animatronic dragons, and the vague sense that your porch display is being graded by unseen neighbors. I understand the temptation to opt out. I understand the exhaustion. But I think that would be a mistake. Halloween is not frivolous. It is a civic holiday disguised as a spooky one.
Consider what Halloween actually asks of us. It asks us to decorate, even badly. It asks us to walk around our neighborhoods and talk to people we might otherwise only wave at through car windows. It asks us to compliment strangers—on their costumes, their pumpkins, their courage in wearing a wig in public. It asks us to give candy to children we do not know and to trust that they will say thank you, or at least that their parents will prompt them. In a country that is exhausted and divided, that is not nothing. It is a neighborhood trust exercise with sugar.
And it is a rehearsal for mortality. Halloween is the one night when we let death into the room and make it dance. We put skeletons on our lawns. We dress as ghosts. We watch horror movies and pay good money to be chased through fake haunted houses by people in masks. This is not morbid; it is ancient. We are practicing being scared in a safe container. A haunted house is a controlled burn. You scream, you laugh, you leave. You learn, in your body, that fear can be survived. That is a useful lesson in any season, but especially in this one.
Beetlejuice understood this. He was a trickster, not a tyrant. He was scary the way a roller coaster is scary—loud, chaotic, and ultimately harmless. The cartoon had an anarchic energy that I loved as a kid and appreciate more as an adult. It was a show about a ghost who was not particularly good at being a ghost, surrounded by people who were not particularly good at being normal. It made weirdness feel like a feature, not a bug. It made the strange kid in the back of the class look like the most alive person in the room. That is a gift to a child. It is also a gift to an adult who has spent too much time trying to be normal.
Beetlejuice is summoned by saying his name three times. Halloween works the same way. Say “costume” three times, and you summon your childhood self. Say “candy” three times, and you summon the kid who once traded a full-size chocolate bar for a handful of sour gummies and felt like a financial genius. Say “spooky” three times, and you summon the memory of a house with a fog machine and a guy who jumped out from behind a bush, and you remember that you screamed so hard you almost cried, and then you laughed until your stomach hurt. That is the alchemy of Halloween. It turns memory into ritual.
I remember one year I tried to be Beetlejuice. My mother found a striped shirt at a thrift store, and I wore black eyeliner and a wild wig that kept slipping sideways. I looked less like Michael Keaton and more like a raccoon who had been to a yard sale. But I felt transformed. That is the point. Halloween does not require you to be good at it. It requires you to participate. A cardboard-box robot is still a robot. A last-minute cat is still a cat. A person in a black hoodie who claims to be “a shadow” is still, technically, in costume. The holiday’s genius is that it is forgiving. It rewards effort, but it also rewards nerve.
That is why I am looking forward to this week’s party. It will be fun. I know that sounds simple, maybe even silly, but fun is not a luxury. Fun is a way of surviving. We spend so much of our lives being careful—careful with money, careful with words, careful with our time. Halloween gives us permission to be careless in the best way. To eat too much candy. To dance badly. To wear something ridiculous. To laugh at things that are not sophisticated or important. To be a kid again, for a few hours, with adult privileges like a later bedtime and the ability to drive home.
The recent Beetlejuice sequel has brought the ghost back into the culture, but for me he never really left. He is in the back of my closet with the costume I am not sure about. He is in the after-school slot of my memory, next to the smell of autumn air and the sound of leaves skittering down the sidewalk. He is a reminder that death can be a joke, that chaos can be playful, and that the weird kid—the one who talks to ghosts, the one who wears the wrong clothes, the one who laughs at the wrong moment—might be the one who knows how to have a good time.
So this week, we will go to the party. I will put on my costume, such as it is. I will eat too much candy. I will compliment strangers on their courage. I will say “Beetlejuice” three times, not because I believe in ghosts but because I believe in rituals. I believe in the power of a night that asks us to be silly and brave and neighborly all at once. I believe that Halloween is not an escape from real life but a reminder of what real life can be when we let it: strange, funny, generous, and a little bit haunted.
Happy Halloween. It’s showtime.
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