The loss of "Halloween" as we recall it, is a direct result of the "fear of strangers" that we all live with these days. I'm in my early 50's and my parents had only a general idea of where I was and what I was doing after school and during summer vacations. I was certainly in the neighborhood, I was traveling by bike, and I was almost always in the company of a pack of neighborhood friends.
"Kidnapping" was a fear only the wealthiest people ever worried about. We children of the middle-class suburbs were never considered "at risk" of disappearing.
Now, kids are taught not to talk to the people next door. They can't leave the house until a parent comes home from work. They have to be driven to every after-school activity and it's ALL arranged by adults. No more hanging around your own neighborhood, riding your bikes on your own block, or playing in your friends' houses or backyards. The parents are terrorized, the kids are "organized" and childhood has become a period of anxiety and stress that everyone seems to feel can't be gotten through fast enough. We have allowed 24-hour news programs to make us all a paranoid nation.
And that's why Halloween (and Childhood) as WE knew it is barely a memory that kids today wouldn't even believe ever happened.
