We didn’t get one! Hence our surfeit of ‘Fizzy Fang’ sweets. Is this just a case of ghouls and ghosts just getting pickier? Or a spookier signal of the changing levels of social capital and declining communality in our society?
I had hoped my 8-year-old grandson’s insight on last year’s similar ghostly no-show was that we didn’t have any Halloween decorations up. Yet his house, bedecked in Pumpkins, fake cobwebs, and spooks, only got two Halloween visitors.
It is a question being asked on the other side of the Pond too. But what does it matter if fewer are trick or treating? It was only largely an American bought-in fad anyway.
Yet, the underlying issues – echoing Robert Putnam’s seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone of how fewer of us mix socially with people outside our immediate bubbles and groups – has profound implications for our social fabric: the stuff that holds us together, that enables us to co-exist, co-operate, collaborate gets weaker with every less interaction.
Just hope we don’t give up the ghost of connecting with our neighbourhoods and communities; otherwise issues like growing social division and polarisation will only worsen.
Now that’s a scary thought.
