CSotD: All Hallows Humpday
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We’ll start with my annual Grinchy reminder that it was Linus, not Charlie Brown, who cut all those eyeholes into his sheet. This was Halloween, 1956, when Linus and Schroeder were still toddlers, before they hit the cutoff age where Peanuts characters stopped growing.
However, it’s like Star Wars in that things are “canonical” rather than “revisionist,” as demonstrated in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Though I note that neither cartoonist tells us whether the kid with the holy sheet is Linus, Charlie Brown or Greedo, since they’re concentrating, instead, on the current policy of cruelty, which does, indeed, draw the expression “Holy sheet!”
But we’ll deal with all that political stuff another day.
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that the Peanuts Universe could make a dystopic Halloween fantasy movie: A land where babies become toddlers and then hit an age where everything stops, a land where there are no adults and things that adults would be expected to do are handled by invisible trombones.
This nice person would be happy, anyway. The plot hole in the movie would be the question of where, in a land without adults, those babies came from, and the answer would be that every Halloween Satan would impregnate his bride. (Satan would be an invisible bassoon.)
This is not a picture of the couple who are so distraught by their neighbor’s horrifying and demonic array. Rather, they are the typical Bostonians in Francis Dahl’s wonderful cartoons about Beantown culture.
Here’s an appreciation of Dahl by a recent convert, plus a substantial sample of his work. I’ve known about Dahl more or less from birth, since my parents met as college students in Boston in the ’40s and my father was a good amateur cartoonist, making Dahl not only a presence on our bookshelves but a frequently referenced source of wisdom.
I think of Dahl each Halloween because he was determined not to let New Englanders be blamed for the burning of witches, though his droll explanations never quite let anybody off the hook.
I suppose I absorbed his take on things, because one of the few stories I ever had spiked was a critical report on an Elmer Gantry-style preacher who came to town with a Satanic Panic message and a lot of empty KFC buckets that were passed around at his talk so that people could fill them with donations to keep the devil from devouring their children or some such thing.
My reporting was solid, but I had an editor who may not have thought Halloween was Satanic but deeply believed in magical ancient rituals despite their having been largely invented out of whole cloth by eccentric British intellectuals.
I recommend you read that article, but caution you that, if you quote it too often, you’ll find out how many people are deeply invested in passionately defending magical ancient rituals.
People really were, of course, hanged, pressed or burned for being witches, but only by people who believed in paranoid nonsense.
As Arthur Miller suggested, we don’t execute witches anymore but we haven’t stopped torturing people who don’t fit our sociopolitical cookie cutters.
He meant McCarthy but it turns out we still have no sense of decency after all. However, as said, we’ll deal with current politics another day.
My skepticism about those magical ancient rituals did give me a laff over Paul Noth’s spin on the cliche of pointy-hatted women around a cauldron, which, BTW, goes farther back than Aleister Crowley and his cohorts.
I worked in an office with a bunch of very nice young women who did not wear pointy hats but were obsessed with smoothies, which are good for your body but not so good for wall-to-wall carpeting, as a result of which we had several massive stains that were the result of inevitable spillage.
I don’t have a problem with people who go crazy over Halloween decor, though I’m enough of a traditionalist to prefer orange pumpkins to white pumpkins and gourds, and jack o’ lanterns with scary triangular facial features to elaborately carved mini-dioramas.
But I’m perfectly content to chalk that up to different strokes for different folks, particularly since my apartment is at the back of the house, so that outside decorations would be wasted anyway.
In fact, my apartment is so obscure that even politicians running for office pass me by, as happened back in 2015, to my dismay and to the intense amusement of my son who sent me a screen shot of NBC’s national coverage of the non-event.
The result is that I have fewer than half a dozen trick-or-treaters each year, which leaves me with such a good supply of candy that I don’t bother waiting until November 1 to eat it myself.
But Cliff is right that not only are we past handing out two-dollar full-size bars, but that somehow “Fun SizeTM” bars — which were never all that much fun in the first place — have become even less so, such that Reese’s now labels their Halloween candy as a “miniature cup.”
Even calling them “miniature” is puffery. I prefer the suggested term in the strip: “sad disappointment.”
Pam has found the answer: The kids will start out-sourcing the job. They won’t even have to go to a parking lot to collect from the neighborhood’s assembled car trunks anymore.
I understand delivery services if you live in a major metro where leaving your apartment includes giving up a parking space you may never find again, but out here, I can get back and forth for really good pizza or Chinese food in less than 20 minutes total, and if I were to go fetch my own McDonald’s, I’d get to eat the fries on the way home before they turned into lukewarm cardboard.
I saw an Amazon ad that said Prime customers now qualify for free GrubHub delivery, which immediately triggered my BS-detector, since the promise of free delivery strongly suggests stiffing the poor wretch making the trip.
If I were driving for GrubHub, I’d carry a supply of toilet paper and eggs in case I found my client was an Amazon Prime member.
Even if he were a beloved duck.
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