Canuckflack

A new take on the 1% rule: on Halloween night, the spirit of candy grubbing children is strengthened and invigorated by those homeowners obsessed with decorating their house and frightening small children on Halloween.

Based upon my sampling of traffic flows on the streets of my very anodyne suburban neighbourhood, children are drawn to the houses with the biggest displays, loudest noises and best fog machines.

This 1% of homeowners - the ones that spend hundreds of dollars on decorations - fuel participation in Halloween festivities and heighten the sense of participation and community among Trick-or-Treaters.

The sample, I feel, is quite accurate: my neighbourhood is filled with nearly identical streets lined with very similar houses with builder-mandated colour schemes.

Our neighbours are a heterogeneous lot, with some fierce believers in Halloween and some true agnostics (however paradoxical the term). This means that some streets are evenly spaced with lightly decorated houses, and some streets have two or three extravagantly decorated houses randomly located among the others.

Tonight, the chatter of excited children bounced all along the more heavily decorated roads: the dedication of that 1% of true Halloween fanatics fuelled excitement and pariticipation among the younger set.

On the other roads, homeowners peeked from behind cat’s eye appliques layered on living room windows, looking for marauding gangs of Snow Whites, Avril Lavignes, Tiggers and Freddy Kreugers, wondering whether they would be eating ketchup-flavoured sample bags of potato chips for weeks to come.

It’s true - a community is energized by the over-the-top actions of its most fervent participants.