If you think about it, everyone is always already wearing a costume, and that includes even the bellicose fellow trying to impress his Tinder date by getting aggravated at a group of cyclists standing nearby in a public park, so you can cut yourself a little slack if you’ve arrived at the traditional meetup location on the traditional costume-wearing evening sporting your traditional daytime garb; at the same time, however, you have to admire the pluck of colleagues who arrive bedecked in gladiator garb, or Burning Man-approved onesies, or with reference to hobgoblins from foreign cultures, or sporting a ghost on the back seat of their tandem, and commend them for carrying on the traditional nonsense in the traditional ways at the traditional time.
Hear-hear! Huzzah.
Eventually, the assembled arrived at the spooky outdoor living room with the nearly-full moon illuminating the spindly autumn trees in all their skeletal glory; a cheerful fire in the unbricked-in fireplace crackled like a witch’s voice while the voices of those in every costume rose and fell and rose again in spite of admonitions by the usual wet-blanket to keep it down, why doncha?
Apparently, the holiday has mostly been cancelled, at least for little kids wanting free candy, so it’s heartwarming to note that, in some form or another, treats and tricking carries on, in spite of it all.
Putative grownups still clamor for their own preferred goodies and continue to enjoy the opportunities for clamor; I’m sure the indigenous spirits and the spirits of whatever settlers settled in the spots we settled in for a time had their own ectoplasmic dances going on, as well.
Who knows what the near future may bring, right? It’s possible—well, always possible, but even more so now—that we could have seen the final two-wheeled shenanigans of our lives just then; if so, the loss will be deeply mourned but not as much as the events themselves are celebrated.
In costume, inevitably.
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