How long is too long?

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

So, I was having a conversation with my employees today about Halloween and the topic of jack-o-lanterns came up, and we were discussing how long you should leave pumpkins out after Halloween?

We always bring them in on the evening of Nov. 1st, my brother has a tradition of leaving them out until the 5th, and most of the people in the conversation said that 5 days was a good amount of time to let them stay out.

Around here, ever since I was a kid there is a tradition that you must not ever bring in your pumpkins on Halloween night, and you must wait at least a day to do it, so I've always done that. The longest I have seen people leave their pumpkins out for is 2 weeks, usually by then it's pretty cold here so they don't start to go rotten yet.

What about you guys, how long do you leave your pumpkins out for?

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[Murfreesboro]

I generally leave all my decorations out through Nov 2, That's Halloween, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day. The Catholics call that three day period Hallowmas, I believe. After that I amend Halloween decorations to autumnal for Thanksgiving. My husband is very insistent that Christmas doesn't go up until Thanksgiving is over, so I try to get the Christmas stuff started on Thanksgiving weekend. But I often miss that mark because things start getting so crazy busy.

[Andybev01]

They definitely should be outside to scare away the ghosts and goblins.But if you're in a sketchy area then they have to be in a door or window looking out to guard the place.

As far as life span , I let mine sit out until they get spongy , but not moldy or melted into the ground.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I usually leave my decorations up for a week, sometimes 2 weeks. However, a few years ago I was really busy with work and they were still up after 3 weeks and they said they were going to fine me for it so I got up at 4am to put them away before I went to work.

I've seen people around here that start putting up Christmas decorations on Nov. 1st, my wife usually starts decorating around the middle of the month, and then she goes Christmas crazy until the end of the year. On the years that we have Thanksgiving at our place my wife doesn't decorate much for it other than on the day of when we have decorations that are on the table with the meal.

My mother has always, and still does decorate heavily for Thanksgiving, as she wants everybody coming over to know that they are in for a feast, so she goes all out with with her presentation. Actually, she's that way with any holiday, you wouldn't believe how elaborate her 4th of July spread is. I think it's just the way the older generation is, they were raised to put the most into their decorating for holidays and events, not only because it was expected of them, but also because it was a status symbol in society.

I think my wife would put more effort into her Thanksgiving decorating if she had more time to spend on it, but she is always busy with work and everything else, so that's why we usually have Thanksgiving at my mother's place. The only holiday that I put effort into decorating for is Halloween, and my wife handles Christmas, so the kids have one crazy parent for each holiday.

[Andybev01]

I was raised in a holiday house for sure.

Many were made by us kids, with supplies from a seemingly bottomless box of scraps of all kinds.

We would play records and sit around the big farm table and try to make our imaginings into reality.

Sadly my parents never had the time (or funds) to photograph any of this but the memories are solid, and I'm sure that if I make to 100, my last two functioning brain cells will be fighting over images of a Christmas or Halloween doo-dad that I made when I still believed in Santa, or that jack-o-lanterns came alive when lit.

[Murfreesboro]

Halloween was actually pretty low key in Mississippi when I was a child. Neither one of my parents had ever costumed or ToTed as kids. My mother heard of that for the first time when she lived in California in the 1930s as a young woman. She said the kids would dress as hobos. It was all very new to her. Then WW2 came, sugar was rationed, and nobody was handing out candy. After the war, I think that's when the real middle class American monoculture kicked in. At school we'd have costume parades and draw pictures of Jack o'lanterns, even though I never saw one. I never even saw a pumpkin at a grocery store until I was grown. I think my adult obsession with decorating for Halloween came about because I wanted to create the Halloween I'd always dreamed of but never had.

Since my father was dead and my mother's family were all up in Arkansas, we were always hitting the road for Arkansas at Christmas and Easter, and we were usually up there for the 4th of July, too. At Thanksgiving my aunt and one or more cousins would drive down to us. Because Mama and I were not usually at home, household decorating wasn't big with us. I loved our Christmas trees, though, both at home and at my relatives' homes.

The 4th of July wasn't really all that big in the deep South until the 1970s, when everybody geared up for the Bicentennial. Since Vicksburg had fallen on the 4th, nobody in Mississippi celebrated it at all until WW2, and by the time I came along the celebrations were still subdued. I never saw community fireworks until the mid-70s. Prior to that, people used to shoot off fireworks on Christmas night. I remember doing that myself with family up in Arkansas. But my mother was actually glad when that custom dropped away. She liked fireworks on the 4th, not Christmas. I really think it was the Bicentennial that changed things. Everybody really enjoyed that celebration and wanted to keep it going.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

My grandfather and grandaunt have told me how Halloween was always big in California. When they were young, Sam, Millie, and Mabel got to experience the very early traditions of the holiday as it was starting to become what we know and love today. Back in the late 20s to the early 30s there was no prepackaged candy, so people would hand out homemade treats to the kids, and while store bought costumes did exist at that point, Millie said that they made their own costumes.

It wasn't until around the mid 30s that companies started to sell prepackaged candy, Millie told us that she was 10 the first time she recalled getting name brand candy while trick-or-treating. As you mentioned, with sugar rationing during the war, homemade treats were still the most common thing that trick-or-treaters got.

By the time my mother started trick-or-treating in the late 50s, individually wrapped candy bars, and lollipops became common for trick-or-treaters, and by the 70s reports of tampering incidents, and widespread fear of tainted or poisoned candy made parents shift away from homemade treats and fruits to the safer and more hygienic individually wrapped treats, and that continues to this day. Of course, I'm talking about my family's experiences growing up in California specifically, I know that it was different for everybody depending on where you lived.

This photo that I also posted in the other thread shows people from the University of Southern California celebrating Halloween in 1890. That was 135 years ago! So it's clear that people in California embraced the holiday from the beginning.

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I'm also posting this picture here because it goes well with this discussion of holidays.

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[Murfreesboro]

I love that Snoopy strip! Wish I had a poster of that.

From my Haunted History of Halloween dvd, it seems the Northern states got Halloween first, and I'm guessing there was more back and forth between CA and the Northern states than there was between the North and South in those days.

For one thing, although of course there were Catholics everywhere, the Catholics were decidedly in the minority down here, and Hallowmas is more of a Catholic thing. Then, too, it's hard to overstate how devastated the South was by the Civil War and Reconstruction. When the North was experiencing the Gilded Age, the South was dirt poor. My mother's father was so poor he basically didn't have Christmas unless some church charity gave him something. To him it was a huge deal that he was able to give his own children beautiful Christmases in the 1910s and '20s. People in those circumstances don't give out candy randomly on holidays they've never heard of.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

Man, your grandfather went through some tough times, but thankfully he was able to build a good life for himself and his family.

Regarding the early days of Halloween in this country, I haven't watched that particular documentary, but I have watched a variety of others and while some of them say the exact same thing, most likely because they are made by the same company, or they are just copying what others have said before, some of them give different explanations of how and where Halloween first gained popularity.

Most of the documentaries that I've watched agree that the influx of Irish immigrants was a major factor in popularizing Halloween nationally, as their customs spread the celebration across the country starting from the East Coast where they originally arrived.

Later, some States established organized Halloween celebrations in the early 1900s to curb destructive pranks and that started community events aimed at youth in particular. While communities in the North were involved in the early spread of Halloween, the tradition's origin here is not directly tied to any specific region being the first to celebrate the holiday.

Honestly, most historical documentaries usually aren't always accurate, so I don't think we will ever know for sure because we weren't there, but regardless of where Halloween got started in this country, I'm just thankful that we have Halloween and that we got to experience the glory days of the holiday. Unfortunately, we are now living in a time where we are witnessing the decline of the holiday, but hopefully it will regain some momentum and rise in popularity again one day.

[Murfreesboro]

If Halloween is dipping in popularity right now, it might be because there are fewer children at the moment. The 90s were a very child-centric decade because there were actually more children then than there were during the baby boom, although nobody talks about it. There will be a demographic cliff of college-aged kids starting in 2026. Lots of smaller colleges may not make it. They've been bracing for it for at least ten years.

You are right of course about the reliability of documentaries. The one i own actually says that New England, settled by Puritans, didn't even celebrate Christmas, much less Halloween. Virginia actually celebrated Halloween "play parties" in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were similar to the one depicted in the Burton/Depp Sleepy Hollow. ToT came much later, though. I think the cataclysm of the Civil War/Reconstruction put the brakes on those big celebrations in the South. And of course the Irish immigrants of the 1840s came mostly to the Northeast, although Savannah, I think, had a huge Irish population in the 18th century.

I have a big Southern Living Christmas book which asserts that Christmas celebrations really took off first in the South, and Alabama was the first state to make it an official holiday (1830s, maybe?). The resurgence of Christmas in the English-speaking world was quite a phenomenon in the 19th century. Dickens played a big part in it, but I learned only within the last ten years or so that Washington Irving's stories about an old-fashioned Engkish country Christmas predated Christmas Carol by about 20 years. Dickens knew Irving, corresponded with him, so he must have known those stories, which seem to have influenced his Ghost of Christmas Present. The ghost story idea was Dickens', though.

Funny to think that Washington Irving may have been seminal in the reinvigoration of both Halloween and Christmas in this country.

[Andybev01]

I think I mentioned isomewhere in here a year or so ago, about the Dickens biopic movie called 'The Man Who Invented Christmas'.

If you haven't watched it yet it's worth pursuing.

Also; I wonder how many of the people in your USC photo are now ghosts themselves.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, I love The Man Who Invented Christmas! I have the book on which it was based, too.

What a neat suggestion, about the ghosts in the 19th century photo!

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I think that Halloween is declining for a number of reasons, from what I've observed less and less kids go out trick-or-treating every year, at least in my area. I think that is because some kids today aren't interested in Halloween as much as they used to be unless they have enthusiastic parents, like me, that teach their kids to embrace the traditions of the holiday.

If you're a kid today you already live in a world that is telling you to grow up too fast, so most kids don't even want to go trick-or-treating because society and their friends make them feel like they're babies for doing it, and for the kids that do go trick-or-treating they really have to put in effort to get a full bag of candy by the end of the night because there are less people handing out candy now, part of that is due to the constantly rising prices of candy, as well as adults not wanting to decorate or participate in the holiday anymore.

I have mentioned before that when I moved into this neighborhood the holiday was still very popular, and most people here still decorated. I used to coordinate with my neighbors and we would have a huge Halloween yard display that spread across 4 houses, it was absolutely beautiful. We did that for a few years until one of the older neighbors passed away, then the others lost interest and some of them moved away and eventually it was only me decorating.

For about 8 years straight I was the only person around here that was still decorating, at first you would have to walk 10 houses on either side of me to get to another house that was decorated. Then the pandemic happened, and ever since then nobody has been decorating, I remember one year on Halloween I stood there and looked down the street and there wasn't a single house that was decorated anywhere in view, and it was that way until last year when the new neighbor and her kids moved in, now there are 2 houses on this block that decorate.

I try to give visitors on Halloween a yard display that they will always remember, not only do I decorate but I also play Halloween music and sound effects, and I have a few of my employees dressed in costumes to scare the guests, and people tell me that they make sure to go out of their way every year to visit my house because they love the decorations, and we have literally watched the kids around here grow up because they have been coming here for years. I have a lot of great items that I use to decorate every year, but my absolute favorite is my Headless Horseman statue, that's right, it's not just a username, it's a way of life.

As I said before, my wife stays home to give out candy, and I always go trick-or-treating with the girls. There is hardly anybody giving out candy around here, so for the last few years I have actually had to put the kids in the car and drive to different neighborhoods just to make sure that they can get a decent amount of candy. It really is sad when you think about it, when I was a kid on a really good Halloween I would come home at the end of the night with 2 pillow cases filled with candy, but now it's hard to get even one small bag filled to the top. I mentioned that last year it was one of the best Halloweens we have had in years, probably because we went to a better area for trick-or-treating, but even here, my wife said that there were more kids here than she has seen in years, so maybe that will continue this year.

Of course, Halloween isn't just about candy, I have noticed that Halloween is still very popular with people around my age, the people in their 30s-40s right now are the demographic that spends the most on the holiday every year, just visit your local Spirit Halloween, adult costumes are their best sellers because that age group still likes to have Halloween parties. It's the same thing with the decorations and collectibles they sell, it's adults that get that stuff because it's based on franchises that we are nostalgic for. Some people don't have kids but they still celebrate the holiday because they grew up with it, and it's a part of them. I think that Halloween will still remain popular for the older people like us, and we can only hope that the traditions we pass on to the next generation will continue to survive and thrive for as long as our society is here.

The Man Who Invented Christmas'.

Watched it, loved it.

I wonder how many of the people in your USC photo are now ghosts themselves.

I would say each and every one of them, and the gymnasium building as well.

Because I mentioned it, here is a old picture of my favorite decoration. Tonight I ride... insert maniacal laughter here.

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