A little Halloween history as Daylight Saving Time ends

Another Halloween has passed and still no kids have soaped my windows. Slackers! It's not like I'M going to do it. I would rinse them, though, certainly. Squeegee them too. Kids these days couldn't find a bar of soap with a supermarket and a flashlight.

Daylight Saving Time ended this morning, which just means your kids were throwing up candy at 3 a.m. instead of 4. Your body clock is now shot for about a week, so don't fight it. Administer leftover candy corn every four hours until it's gone or it's Christmas, the latter being more likely. 

My children are older now, so the time I would have spent shining a flashlight on curbs last night trick-or-treating I spent instead watching a 20 year old video on the history of Halloween. It wasn't pretty. The 1990s production values, I mean, not the history.

It seems 3000 years ago in Ireland, the locals decided that this period of the year, transitioning from the light to the dark, meant those who had died in the past year might walk the Earth again. In order to appease them, they set out treats on the edge of town, hoping to keep them a respectable distance from the nicer retail areas. Or, as my wife said, "Stay in your grave—here's a Snickers."

To give thanks for nature's bounty, they sacrificed cattle and other animals, burned them on bonfires, and then the Druid in charge interpreted the charred entrails to predict the coming year's prospects for various individuals. Pronouncements like "Sorry, Siobhan, but this smoking cow liver says you should probably not be around knives this year" were common.

Christians, since they could not convince the pagans to give up their autumnal worship of dozens of nature gods, chose the same date to celebrate All Hallows Day. But people, as people will do, kept riffing on the holiday, so that over the centuries we ended up with British children burning effigies of a famous would-be Parliament bomber, and in the American south on Halloween, women began looking for omens of the faces of their future husbands in baked goods. 

Recently some Christians have created "Jesusween," and give out Bibles to children instead of candy. This probably does not go over big at first, but as I recall, back when I was a kid in the bathroom at 3 a.m. repenting my overindulgence, I would have been surprisingly open to salvation.

. . .

Horror convention gives father and son a ghoul time

Recently I went to a horror convention, which I want to assure my male readers is not, in fact, shorthand for a baby shower.

Baby showers are certainly horror enough for a man, even it it's your baby. If it's not yours, and the hosts are teetotalers, this veers beyond horror into cruelty. All those tiny, asexual yellow onesies are enough to make a man eat a fireplace poker.

But this was an actual horror expo at the Pasadena Convention Center. The only babies in evidence were props being dragged behind a woman dressed as La Llorona, the famously sad ghost mom.

There were quite a few attendees in costume, although less cleavage on display than your average Renaissance Fair. More giant, bloody mutant rabbits walking upright, though. I don't know what movie/comic book they were from. I don't really keep up with horror, unless you count politics.

I was there because my son is a fan of those horror mazes that amusement parks build in October, and there were discussion panels headed by the creative directors behind them. They were sharing spoilers about this Halloween's plans and getting cheers like the Dodgers used to get.

Who knew there were superfans of horror mazes, who follow news tidbits about upcoming designs the way baseball fans peruse disabled lists? There is a subculture for everything, it appears.

The convention was called "Scare L.A." and this was its third year. Aside from the panels, it consisted of 150 or so vendor booths (typical name: "Dapper Cadaver") selling stuff to scare trick-or-treaters off your lawn. Or spice up your love life. Depends on how you roll.

I enjoyed the exhibit hall the most, with vendors competing to emit the spookiest fog and sell the latexiest ghoul mask. (Horror knows no adjectival limits.)

You could buy a huge, four-foot wide clown face complete with light-up nose. Forget the lawn; that would clear your entire block.

They had severed limbs. Bloody axes. Not those cheap ones you see in the temporary Halloween stores. The good stuff, which appeared as if it had been used on actual screenwriters.

There were booths like "BoogerVampire" and "Brainfarto" and "Toxic Toons." My son is 14. He had the glazed-over look I get when an old Adrienne Barbeau movie comes on. Undiluted bliss.

It was a bonding thing too. You never forget looking at rubber torn-out throats with your old dad. Ah, they grow up so fast.