cabbage night

When I was a kid, we had something called Cabbage Night. Akin to Mischief Night and Devil’s Night, it was the night before Halloween when the neighborhood “hoodlums” would play all sorts of pranks and practical jokes and otherwise wreak havoc on their neighbors. It seems, however, that in these kinder, gentler, more politically correct times, nobody observes Cabbage Night anymore.

 This is too bad.

There was nothing scarier than walking to school on Halloween morning through the carnage of the night before: the cars with their windows soaped, the t.p. draped across bushes and trees, the cryptic messages written on the road in shaving cream. Because these tokens of Cabbage Night were reminders that as we slept, snug in our cozy, warms beds, evil lurked among us. And not only that, the evil was us since the neighborhood hoodlums were often our brothers and sisters and, in some cases, even our fathers.

If you ask me, coming face-to-face with the human propensity  to wreak havoc and do harm especially in a nice quiet suburban neighborhood like mine, is far scarier than any ghost or goblin you could conjure.