Wednesday, October 31, 2007

STL Halloween Traditions Invade NPR's Talk of the Nation

One of the nice things about living in an old city like St. Louis is the way old traditions are part of the culture. For some reason, St. Louis has very well established Halloween traditions.

If they indexed cities for the quality of their Halloween celebrations, St. Louis would have to be near the top. Yesterday, Amy Dickinson from the Chicago Sun Times Ask Amy column was NPR's Neal Conan's guest on the Talk of the Nation show. They were talking about Halloween celebrations. St. Louis callers flooded the program. Amy and Neil were noticeably impressed by the St. Louis showing.

One caller (not from St. Louis, but it sure sounded like St. Louis) talked about handing the first adults to come by with their kids a beer. Amy was a little taken aback by that idea. I don't know. We see lots of parents walking with their kids on Halloween. The kids go to the door, and the parents stay on the sidewalk, frequently next to a wagon hauling a cooler loaded cold beers. Maybe Halloweens up in Chi-Town are a little more staid than ours?

Amy and Neil talked about how its good for kids to get a little scared on Halloween, as long as its a safe kind of scared. We should have that covered. We get a block party permit, have kids from a wide area show up, half the houses on our block are decorated, maybe some deep bass from a theatrical sub woofer toning haunting riffs, and from 200-300 + trick or treaters.

The film Meet Me In St. Louis does a wonderful job of showing how our four seasons and holiday celebrations are a big part of life in our town. This online review has some more interesting comments about the film.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Diane Rehm show seems to get a disproportionately large number of callers from St. Louis on a regular basis as well. We must be smart.