Editor’s note: This article was published in Grand Traverse Scene magazine’s Fall 2025 issue. Pick up a free copy at area hotels, visitor’s centers, chambers of commerce or at the Record-Eagle building on Front Street. Click here to read GT Scene in its entirety online.
I love Halloween. Not for the candy or how cute the kids look trick-or-treating, but because it’s the only unsanctioned yet approved event of the entire year when it’s perfectly acceptable to be a complete moron. One big night of conspiracy that everyone’s in on — from parents and in-laws to cops and fire departments — to have a good time and hope nothing bad happens. And in true American fashion, having a good time means the suspension of not just good judgement, but every last shred of it, all of which begins earlier in October with the appetizers, if you will, to Halloween: corn mazes and pumpkin carving.
Have you ever temporarily lost a kid in a department store or amusement park? Or maybe taken your eye off a youngster at the beach? They rank as the most panic-filled moments of your life, yet on a sunny afternoon around harvest time, parents turn their children loose in a corn maze the size of Manhattan, typically next to a busy road, and dare them to find the end while we go swill hard cider and check Facebook. I stopped going through them after the first time when, in a fit of unbridled claustrophobia, I curled my four-year-old daughter under an arm like a football, lowered my head, and ran straight for the setting sun crosswise through what the farmer and his insurance adjuster ended up telling me was 100 rows of perfectly harvestable corn. You could see the path I’d made from space.
Corn mazes completed and everyone accounted for, the family would see how many pumpkins the ‘ole man could carry until needing spinal fusion surgery before heading home for arguably the most dangerous of all Halloween activities save eating unopened candy from a wet market in China: pumpkin carving. Yes folks, throughout the entire year, we store knives safe and out-of-reach of our kids, cut their food, and tell them not to run with scissors, all of which are tossed out the window when there’s a pumpkin-carving contest on the line. Now it’s not just a knife, but the sharpest one you can find, daddy, which we gladly hand over so we can get back to Seinfeld reruns while the kids are occupied. This wonderful evening is capped off by lighting a fire inside a giant squash to see every awesomely grotesque feature shine in all their primal glory before we drift off to sleep, forgetting to blow out the candles.
While the big day should never, ever be referred to as a sacred event, it may as well be given the emphasis put on it, by both young trick-or-treaters looking to show off their costumes and score big in the sugar department, and crazy older folks who began deploying lawn decorations on Labor Day in a sadistic attempt to scare nightmares into kids who, up to that point, had been sleeping peacefully through the night. Such special days are never delayed, or, God forbid, postponed, due to weather, and Halloween tops that list. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night actually originated not by determined postal workers but by excited kids and exhausted parents on Halloween. It could be a force-nine, late-October gale with sideways rain and golfball-sized hail turning to three inches of wet snow. Doesn’t matter. Every dad instantly becomes Bill Murray in Caddyshack: “I don’t think the heavy stuff’s gonna come down for quite awhile.”
Aside from the obvious safety factors to observe in adverse weather, like little Johnny the goblin getting skulled by falling limbs, there’s the after effect of inevitable illness. Parents go to mind-numbing lengths to keep their charges sick-free throughout the entire year but totally throw that out the window and let Cinderella run through icy puddles in a tiny dress.
After hypothermia has been addressed for both kid and parent, the evening is completed by Harry Potter stuffing his cakehole with candy from strangers at an alarming rate, delaying sleep by at least two days, and increasing the odds for full-blown pneumonia.
And we’ll do it all again next year.