As I’m sure you already know, Halloween in Canada is an evening of frights, scares, and the occasional attack by arctic wolves. It’s a time of pranks, treats, costumes, and somber reflection on the fragility of life.
Why, I remember when I was a child back in the seventies, and dressing up as the most scary thing I could think of. My parents urged me not to dress as Relic from the Beachcombers every year, but I couldn’t be dissuaded. My older brothers both dressed as Pierre Trudeau. This caused a bit of consternation with the parents, because my brothers insisted on having real cigarettes and shaving a receding hairline. You can imagine the fear inpired by the mere sight of us — a grumpy boy with five o’clock shadow and two miniature prime ministers with comb-overs.
Dressing up was always my favourite part of Halloween. After that, however, we were expected to go trick-or-treating. As I understand it, our neighbors in the United States let their children walk door-to-door asking for candy. Canadian tradition is somewhat different. In Canada, the trick-or-treat is an important subsistance ritual.
After dinner, the children would hop aboard the dogsleds, followed by armed parents to ward off the hungry animals. If you’ve ever seen Hinterland Who’s Who, you’ll know that our land is crawling with vicious packs of eastern grey squirrels. A small family of those can strip the flesh off a costumed child in less than a minute, so parents stayed alert with their hunting rifles.
And so, from door-to-door, we travelled throughout the night (homes are very sparsely situated across the vast tracts of Canadian tundra). At each one, over gleeful shouts of “trick or treat!” and gunshots, the children and their bodyguards were greeted warmly and given carefully wrapped packages of bison meat, beaver pelts, and Canadian Club. The sleds were soon heavy with supplies — enough to last our family through much of winter’s deep freeze.
At the end of the night, which of course lasts for close to a week here in the north, we arrived home and fell exhausted by the warmth of the firepit. As we drifted off into the dreamland under warm HBC blankets, the parents inspected our haul, assessed our losses to the squirrels, and enjoyed the quiet satisfaction of having survived another Canadian Halloween.
