A Year Down Yonder

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal death.

Bereft of movie theaters and nightclubs and beyond the bandwidths of most radio stations, the rural town where Grandma Dowdel lives suffers from a perennial sameness. Its bored citizens take particular delight in traditional holidays (Halloween, Armistice Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Washington’s birthday) that not only break their rustic routines with feasts, carousing, and gamesmanship but also allow them to settle scores and flex their local power under the veils of anonymity or conviviality. As Mary Alice notes, Halloween, hardly noticed in Chicago, is “a big holiday […] in a town like Grandma’s” (21), sprawling over several weeks of vandalism and nocturnal pranks. Under cover of darkness, personal grudges, class resentments, and sheer boredom purge themselves in the vandalism of privies, cars, and other property. Grandma plays her own exuberant part, setting booby traps for vandals and gleefully dousing them with glue. For this reason, says Mary Alice, “Halloween is [Grandma’s] favorite holiday” (23). 

Pranks even extend to Valentine’s Day, when Mary Alice and Ina-Rae Gage outsmart Carleen Lovejoy again with a clever prank involving forged valentines. At Christmastime, children vie to make the shiniest impression at the nativity pageant, crafting elaborate wings and halos to steal the spotlight.