Essays From West of 98: A Community of Neighbors
Bringing the spirit of community to Halloween and beyond
You’ve probably noticed that over the last year-ish, my writing has begun to arc away from specific ideas about rural revitalization and instead towards more towards concepts about how we live as humans. There’s a reason for that. It has become clear to me that we will never solve the questions of rural prosperity without first solving the problems that destroyed rural prosperity in the first place.
Our government could dump trillions of new dollars into rural communities (it will not and, given the finances of our country, it definitely should not), but so long as those problems remain, most of those trillions of dollars would just be trucked right out of rural places and leave those places only marginally better than they are now.
My mind is awash with ideas and thoughts on how we make systemic changes in society. It can be difficult to harness those ideas and thoughts into a cohesive plan of action. But without a doubt, whatever plan of action we have, it has to start local. I wrote about the courage to embrace our parochial nature over the last two weeks for a reason. As we look all across our national and state institutions, many of them are dysfunctional at best and outright on fire at worst. It can feel overwhelming to list everything that needs fixing in our government, business, and cultural institutions. Like I’ve written before, we cannot change those large items alone. We can, however, influence our local community. One person flailing away in a sea of national dysfunction will likely be ignored. A vast sea of individual people working to make a positive influence on their individual community will impact local, state, and national institutions on a collective level.
On that note, let’s talk about Halloween. I read an article a few weeks ago (for the life of me, I cannot remember where), that observed how Halloween is perhaps the holiday in which the most people in America have the same tradition. Think about it—Christmas, Thanksgiving, and July 4th may all have very different traditions depending on geography and your individual family, but for the most part, Halloween is largely celebrated by some minor variation on trick-or-treating.
Last year, I wrote about how I chose to await trick-or-treaters on the front porch instead of sitting inside and waiting for the doorbell to ring. This one move caused an extraordinary increase in the traffic to our house, from only a handful of visitors to me giving out practically our entire stock of candy and other treats. This year, I am stepping it up a notch. While Lauren takes the girls on their trick-or-treat adventure, I will be cooking hot dogs in the front yard and inviting all ages of trick-or-treaters to grab a hot dog, in addition to the candy, beef sticks, and fruit that we will have for visitors.
Like I wrote last year, a healthy trick-or-treating culture alone is not sufficient to sustain a community, but it is a sign of positive things in a community on which you can build community health, stability, and prosperity. We do not all have to grill hot dogs on Halloween. But if you can spend just a few minutes outside, creating a welcoming sense of community at your house, it will have results that cascade to others. And if we continue that attitude throughout the year, it will strengthen the roots of community and fix what ails rural places and America at large.
Many of our institutions may seem to be on fire. I am not saying we should let them burn, but if we keep our own local institutions from burning, that will have a much bigger impact. It starts on nights like Halloween and it starts by making your house a welcoming place in the community, no matter who happens to wander by.
On a related note,
has written a worthwhile piece on one specific aspect of making Halloween a more child and community-friendly event: Stop Trailing Your Trick or Treaters by Car!James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
What a great idea!
I couldn't agree more with your perspective on this. Thank you for mentioning my article!