Today,
pretty much everybody who genuinely loves Halloween
knows what a Halloween Tree is—the festive and macabre
equinoctial version of a Christmas tree. Halloween
Trees have become so popular that, from variety stores
on the low end to Christopher Radko at the high end,
increasingly elaborate ornaments have been created
expressly for them. But it wasn’t always that way. Back
in the last century—in 1971 to be precise—even those
whose favorite holiday Halloween was seemed not to have
come up with the idea. That is, until by a happy and
almost accidental set of circumstances, I did it myself.
Living in
suburban St. Louis and having just received my Master’s
Degree in English from Washington University, I was
embarking on what was to be a thirty-year career as an
English professor and a writer. I was twenty-three at the
time, an age when the most ambitious folk are looking ahead
to a lifetime of success. But I never forgot my childhood
delight in everything about Halloween, about monsters,
about the supernatural, about playing and having great fun
at it.
On evening
(I’d like to think it was a dark and stormy one), I was
leafing through a collection of the cartoons of the late and
deeply-lamented Charles Addams, who had created his “Addams
Family” in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. And my eyes
lit on one of my favorites: a 1947 image of Morticia
decorating the family’s long-dead pine Christmas tree with
little skeletons, snakes, ghosts, coffins and even a vulture
as a tree-topper. Thought I: What a wonderful idea for All
Hallows Eve (or Samhain, pronounced Sow-en, as the ancient
Celts called it). It was the work of a moment in the days
before Halloween that year to find a dead tree branch,
plant it in a crockery pot filled with earth (native soil,
of course) and decorate it with cardboard jack-o-lanterns,
black cats, haunted houses and even a “Lurch” mask as a
homage to the Addams Family. It was the first Halloween
Tree, and I may even have called it that.
But even if I
didn’t, the next year Ray Bradbury settled the issue when
his book for young people, The Halloween Tree, was
published by Knopf. Now, the Halloween Tree had a real
physical existence and even a name supplied by the most
beloved author ever to celebrate the holiday. What Dickens
is to Christmas, Bradbury is to Halloween. And that was the
icing on the soul-cake. I determined that no matter what I
did in life or where I ended up, I’d have a Halloween Tree
every year. And so I have. In the 1973 October issue of St.
Louis magazine, I even wrote about the Tree. In what was
nominally a history of the holiday, I pretended that the
Halloween Tree was an ancient tradition in an effort to
convince anyone who read the article to set up his or her
own Tree. I’m not sure how well it worked. But a few years
later, I naively tried to interest the Hallmark people in
the idea, arguing in my letter to them that they could
produce Halloween ornaments and tap a fresh new market with
fresh new products. What I didn’t know is that one can’t
copyright or patent an idea. I never heard from Hallmark,
but the very next year, small cardboard Halloween Trees
began to appear in their stores hung with—you guessed
it—Halloween ornaments.
Now that the
idea was out there—and some ten years or so after I’d set up
my first Tree—novelty stores, gift shops and catalogues
began, by slow degrees, to feature table-top sized versions
of twisted wire or cast resin to simulate ghostly, leafless
trees, decorated with miniature pumpkins, witches and
goblins. But this slick, “crafty” merchandise missed the
whole point. The Halloween Tree is properly an actual dead
branch, which costs nothing and embodies the spirit of
season. (By the bye, never cut a live branch from a living
tree; the tree won’t like it, and, of course, your
Halloween Tree ought to be dead!)
In the
meantime, my own Halloween Trees were become larger and
more elaborate. In the weeks before the holiday, my wife and
I went out looking for just that right dead tree branch,
best obtained in some excellently spooky place. Once I even
had to strap the Tree to the top of my car just as Christmas
tree hunters do. Lights were eventually added, lights in
appropriately autumnal colors, mostly orange which looked
wonderfully seasonal against the dark, dead limb that formed
the basis for the Tree. And, of course, every time I came
across a perfectly grisly artifact that might hang from the
Tree, I bought it. Today I have so many ornaments that most
remain in storage, and we decorate the Tree just with our
favorites.
In the year
2000, I retired from teaching and moved to Connecticut,
where I live in a renovated 1881 factory building and sail
my little boat Goblin on Long Island Sound. I’ve had a fine
career in academia, I’ve edited or written half a dozen
books—one about that master horror writer H. P. Lovecraft
and others about Sherlock Holmes (including two adult
mysteries, The War of the Worlds Mystery and The Twentieth
Century Limited Mystery). But my love affair with Halloween
and the Halloween Tree has only deepened. The fact that in
2011 my Halloween Tree will reach its 40th birthday is
proof that, properly nurtured, the child in all of us can
live a long and healthy life.
And for
whatever accomplishments I’ve achieved along the way, the
development of what has now become an October icon ranks
equally with the rest. I’ve long said—and only half
jokingly—that if I have an epitaph, it ought to read: Philip
A. Shreffler—Inventor of the Halloween Tree.
Published with
permission ©
2010 Philip A.
Shreffler
