For one night, we are allowed to believe in impossible things.

There is something peculiar about Halloween.

Other holidays ask us to gather, remember, celebrate, give thanks, or exchange gifts. Halloween asks something entirely different.

It asks us to pretend.

We hang ghosts from trees. We carve faces into vegetables and put fire inside them. We decorate our homes with bones. We dress our children as monsters and send them into the darkness to knock on strangers’ doors and demand candy.

Perfectly normal behavior.

And we love it.

But perhaps the strangest thing about Halloween is how deeply familiar it feels. Long before the plastic pumpkins appear in the stores, some of us begin waiting for it. We notice the first cool evening. The first dry leaf scraping across the pavement. The smell of woodsmoke somewhere in the distance.

Something in us recognizes the season.

Maybe that is because Halloween has always lived in the territory between things.

Between summer and winter.

Between harvest and scarcity.

Between childhood and adulthood.

Between what we know and what we suspect might be waiting just beyond the lantern light.

Halloween Lets Us Visit the Frightening Things

Most of the year, we avoid frightening subjects.

Halloween does the opposite.

It puts skeletons on the porch.

That may be part of its peculiar power.

A skeleton is ordinarily a symbol of death. At Halloween, we give it a top hat and make it dance.

A ghost becomes a smiling sheet with eyeholes.

A witch becomes a woman with striped stockings whose primary occupation appears to involve flying into trees.

The frightening becomes ridiculous.

The forbidden becomes decorative.

Death itself becomes something we can hang from the ceiling with fishing line.

There is comfort in that.

For a little while, we are not pretending that frightening things do not exist. We are inviting them inside—and making them behave themselves.

We Get to Become Someone Else

Halloween also gives us something adults rarely receive:

Permission to play.

Children understand this instinctively.

Give a child a towel and it becomes a royal cape. A cardboard box becomes a spaceship. The space beneath a dining table becomes a secret fortress.

Adults gradually learn to stop doing this.

Except on Halloween.

Then perfectly respectable people put on vampire teeth and wander through the grocery store.

Costumes give us permission to temporarily step outside ourselves.

We can be glamorous.

Hideous.

Powerful.

Absurd.

A pirate.

A witch.

A ghost.

A creature nobody has ever seen before.

For a few hours, nobody asks whether it makes sense.

That may be one of Halloween’s greatest gifts.

The Past Comes Along With Us

Halloween is also extraordinarily nostalgic.

Ask someone about Halloween and they often tell you about their Halloween.

The plastic mask that made breathing nearly impossible.

The costume their mother sewed.

The pillowcase used for candy.

The neighborhood house everyone was afraid to approach.

The popcorn balls.

The classroom party.

The waxy little candy pumpkins.

The year it snowed.

The year somebody gave out full-size candy bars and immediately became a neighborhood legend.

Halloween memories are remarkably sensory.

We remember how the air smelled.

How leaves sounded beneath our shoes.

How cold our hands became carrying the candy bucket.

How enormous the neighborhood seemed after dark.

Perhaps that is why vintage Halloween imagery remains so irresistible. Old paper moons, black cats with arched backs, grinning pumpkins, strange witches, and beautifully peculiar costumes do more than look charming.

They suggest that other people once waited for this night too.

Halloween connects us not only with our own childhoods, but with generations of people who celebrated autumn before us.

The Strange Ones Get a Holiday

Maybe this is the part I love most.

Halloween has room for the peculiar.

The person who collects antique photographs.

The kid fascinated by bats.

The woman who knows the names of all the neighborhood crows.

The history lover reading about forgotten superstitions at midnight.

The artist drawing cheerful cemeteries.

The person who would very much like to know what is behind that mysterious little door, despite every story ever written suggesting that opening mysterious little doors is a terrible idea.

Halloween does not ask any of them to be less strange.

For once, strange is the entire point.

And perhaps that is why some of us feel so completely at home here.

Halloween gives us permission to decorate the darkness instead of fearing it. To laugh at death. To remember childhood. To invent impossible creatures. To tell old stories again. To wonder whether the veil between worlds might be just a little thinner than usual.

And when October ends, the pumpkins collapse, the costumes return to their boxes, and the skeletons go back into storage.

Mostly.

But for one night, we allow the world to become mysterious again.

We light the lantern.

We open the door.

And when something strange knocks—

we answer.