It was easy for me to identify with his gaggle of pre-adolescent boys. Although his story has no major female characters, I didn’t mind. After reading it, I will enjoy decorating and handing out treats even more than usual this year.īradbury’s fanciful and highly lyrical tour of the origins and history of the Halloween tradition reminded me of the delights and extremes of childhood. I seem not to attend as many autumn festivals these days as I once did, so I picked up Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree to get into the appropriate holiday mood. We all knew those dimly lit, eerie rooms didn’t really have bowls full of eyeballs, intestines or severed extremities that we were dared to sample, but we plunged our hands into peeled grapes or cold spaghetti or Jell-O and howled with glee! We had pony rides, cakewalks and even a few classrooms set aside for a funhouse.

Who can forget the anticipation of Halloween night when we would all run from door to door in the neighborhood and abscond back home with an untold variety of treats to glory over for days afterward? I particularly loved the autumn fair at my school that always coincided with the Halloween holiday. Even if you haven’t gone trick-or-treating for some time, remember the deliciousness that you felt at this time of year as a child? The beginning of cooler weather in late October takes me back to remembering classrooms festooned with pumpkins, scarecrows and witches, all cunningly cut from construction paper.

The halloween tree by ray bradbury