The Strategist and I spent a couple hours the other night giving out candy and had a blast. Medfield, the neighborhood we live in, could be lovably described as “white trash” - though I am becoming increasingly loathe to use words like that to describe people. But what I mean by that is that everyone constantly seems to be yelling at each other; doors are slamming, things being thrown, fights almost gotten into in the middle of the night at gas stations behind the house. And yet, people there love their holidays (a neighbor told us he was having a “drinking party” because Halloween only comes once a year - even though he drinks just about every night, it seems). And why shouldn’t they? Everyone knows that holidays are special. Especially Halloween. Halloween is especially special.

Halloween is even more important to us nowadays because it represents something almost lost to most modern urban and suburban denizens: Harvest Culture. Harvest Culture arises out of groups of people farming the land, and hunting. When you farm and you hunt the land directly, you find that the earth has been blessed with a bounty of riches: so much so that one man or one family could never make use of all the value which he derives from his use of the land. And so, in Harvest Culture, you give to your fellows the extra bounty which you have been blessed with, and they do the same. You exchange value. By everyone giving freely of what they have left over after their own needs have been met, no one is left hungry.

People like to talk about how Halloween is some kind of pagan holiday, but its spirit of giving makes it one of the most Christian holidays there is, really. America celebrates Harvest Culture a bit more directly in the guise of Thanksgiving, but really Harvest Culture is simply Autumn (especially on the East Coast - glad to be back here for this time of year). It is the time when we gather the fruits of the year’s work and prepare for when times get leaner. We draw together our friends and family and those we hold closest to ourselves and huddle down together to stay warm.

Or that’s the theory anyway. Halloween in Medfield was an absolute hoot. Our next door neighbors dressed like Edward Scissorhands, Death, and various witchy things and spent the evening jumping out from behind hay-bales to scare kids. One of the more interesting phenomena observed in the whole thing was that even though our neighborhood is almost exclusively white trash, the vast majority of the trick-or-treaters were black kids who had obviously come in from other neighborhoods.

While I heard no open grumbling among Medfield denizens about racial differences, I did hear people on the streets talking about not wanting to give away candy to kids not wearing costumes. I get it, but it wasn’t a rule that we enforced at our own candy-distribution station. When you’re giving away free shit, you shouldn’t be choosy or a dick about who you give it to. What the hell is the point? Between my friend and I, we gave out about $60 worth of candy, which is a whole lot of corporate-poison, but it was clear and evident how happy it made the kids. It was also amazing to see all of their different reactions. Some of the black kids who came were obviously aware of the fact that they were “getting something for free” from a white neighborhood which otherwise they wouldn’t be recognized as having a right to hang out in. Baltimore is weird like that: very racially separated in many areas, almost like a checkerboard race distribution of neighborhoods. It’s kind of sad and stupid, really. And I was really happy to see kids of any color and neighborhood origin at our house for candy. It’s weird that we need a holiday where we can put on different costumes in order to be allowed to bridge social gaps like that: but it also makes sense, as costumes are how we enforce our individual and social identity to begin with.

It made me realize what Halloween is all about: sharing value amongst your community. When you have extra, you give it away to others. In Harvest Culture, this is directly obvious: food you don’t eat or game you don’t freeze goes bad. Better to give it away than to waste it. As people have become more and more dependent on chemically-preserved factory foods, this idea of giving away extra so as to prevent waste is in danger of vanishing. Never mind that people have been taught by corporations to throw shit away like its going out of style (or more accurately, as things go out of style they get thrown away). But it is the giving away of extra which is the foundation of community: everyone pitches in a little bit towards the commonwealth, and then makes mutual agreements about how those resources are to be allocated. These are the values upon which human communities have ALWAYS been founded, and yet suddenly I see them slipping away.

How to get them back? Give things away and don’t ask questions about it or enforce rules. When you have extra, pass it on to someone else. I’m not saying people need to cut into their own slice of the pie (unless they want to and can handle it), but if you can’t eat the whole thing yourself, don’t fucking throw it away. Even savages and murderers throughout history didn’t behave like that.

So that leaves us with the second issue: say you have a healthy-functioning community, where people are helping and sharing their extra with each other? That’s going to naturally attract people outside of your community. How should you deal with that? Should you throw up your sword and bar the way? I don’t think so. The only way people can learn these kinds of community values are by actively sharing them with one another. I saw on the faces of some of the kids who came up to us (black or white, it didn’t matter) that they thought they were “getting away with something” by getting free candy from us. And they were, and that’s the point: we were happy to give to them, even if they didn’t *get* why. Some would be greedy and take more than their share, sure, totally. But where did they learn that way of behaving? By example! So give people new examples. Share new models of behavior and be proof that they work better and that they are more fun. It’s important that we retain these rituals, these values, these examples, and that when people take what we give - even if they try to take more than their share - that we tell them in no uncertain terms, “You’re welcome.” Because in Harvest Culture, everyone not only has enough, but there is such abundance and goodness that everyone is left fat and happy - or should be. And we don’t need to institute different social structures or build a new government to enact these kinds of changes. We simply have to live them and stay true to them and pass them on as examples, but more importantly as gifts to others.