The Best Halloween Ever

“Mr. Crabtree […] was just saying don’t stay up past your bedtime and don’t forget your schoolwork and don’t eat a lot of candy and get sick. What’s wrong with that?”

Beth’s mother’s statement in defense of Mr. Crabtree illustrates the vast gap between the way grown-ups and children think. For Mrs. Bradley, the principal’s strict and cautious attitude toward Halloween is natural, but for the children it is stifling.

“They didn’t dress up—they didn’t have to, because they looked like Halloween all the time.”

Beth’s remark about the Herdmans is somewhat mean-spirited, but also funny—and, potentially, envious. While Beth does not want to join the Herdman family, she understands that certain aspects of their lives are more chaotic and varied than hers. The apparent effortlessness with which the Herdman siblings embody their individuality is a marked contrast to the amount of work Alice puts in to come up with the most creative costume every year.

“Like everything else in Alice’s life, her Halloween costume always had to be better than everyone else’s—more original and unusual, or more beautiful and sparkly. When Alice said ‘Trick or treat!’ she wanted people to gasp at the wonder of her, and maybe applaud.”

Beth portrays Alice as a typical overachiever who is deeply invested in getting other people’s approval. The reflection registers the absurdity of Alice’s efforts but also implies some sympathy for Alice, who cannot even put aside her striving on Halloween.

“Charlie said he was going to have Halloween anyway. He said he was going to put on a costume and go trick-or-treating and everything, but he really wasn’t. Neither was I. Nobody was, because we couldn’t have Halloween all by ourselves.”

Beth’s observation that no one can have a Halloween by themselves is important as it illustrates the theme of The Importance of Inclusivity in Communities and the social nature of festivals. Festivals like Halloween are about social bonding and collaboration. The only way they work is when everyone participates, from grumpy Mr. Crabtree to the wild Herdmans.

“This is how teachers’ minds work. They see extra credit in everything.”

Beth makes this observation after a teacher in school suggests students can get extra credit for asking Mr. Crabtree why he, a Halloween-hater, decided to host Halloween at school. Again, the gulf between the thinking of authority figures and children adds to the humor in the text.

“‘After all, how much trouble can they cause right there in school, with teachers and parents everywhere? What can they do?’ Mother smiled at us, as if that was that. It wasn’t.”

Beth’s narration foreshadows the later events in the novel, marking her as more perceptive than her mother. The juxtaposition of her mother’s confidence and Beth’s doubt shows Beth to be a reliable narrator despite her age; it’s the adults whose perceptions are inaccurate.

“I didn’t know what the pumpkin committee was, but it had to be better than your mother running around in witch clothes where everybody could see her.”

For a fifth-grader like Beth, horror lies not just in spooky monsters and dark nights, but also in the embarrassment presented by overenthusiastic parents. Through Beth’s relief at her mother being in the relatively less conspicuous pumpkin committee, the author expertly captures this common childhood emotion. Unlike the previous quotation, where Beth proves more perceptive than her mother, this comment ends up haunting Beth herself. Despite Beth’s best efforts and hopes, her mother will, indeed, end up dressing as a witch.

“We’re not going to waste our time on some dumb Woodrow Wilson PTA Halloween party with schoolteacher ghosts and no trick or treat.”

In contrast with the world of authority and systems, the Herdmans represent the spirit of rebellion and anarchy. Even their language—as shown by the use of the double negative here—shuns the rules of grammar. Ralph Herdman makes it clear that he and his siblings will not be attending the sanitized Halloween with teachers dressed as ghosts. For Ralph, such a Halloween is a parody of the idea of the festival itself.

“‘You have to go to it,’ Charlie told him. ‘I have to go. Everybody has to go. It’s like a big school event.’

As usual, there was more than one Herdman on hand to comment about this.

‘A big school event would be that the school burned down,’ Claude said.”

This exchange between Charlie and the Herdmans encapsulates the wild and unpredictable nature of the Herdman siblings. A school function is not a big event for the Herdmans, but a fire could be. The hyperbolic and snappy statement also shows how the Herdmans like to hype their perception as anarchists. Here, Claude seeds the doubt that the Herdmans might be planning to burn the school down. Of course, in reality, the Herdmans have never caused such lasting or major harm.

“It was good that the Herdmans almost never did the same thing twice. Once they had wallpapered you, you could be pretty sure they wouldn’t wallpaper you again. You could relax.”

Beth’s observation is an example of her trademark humorous narration. She notes that the silver lining about being wallpapered by the Herdmans, as Charlie has been, is that one will not be wallpapered again. Despite their wild appearance, the Herdmans possess a strong sense of fairness and even ethics; they are not intrinsically cruel, and they don’t target the same students over and over again.

“The last time the Herdmans got their hands on Howard, Imogene and Leroy drew pictures all over his bald head and charged people twenty-five cents to look at him. Howard didn’t seem to mind, but Mrs. McCluskey had a fit.”

One of the ways the author adds humor and fun to the narrative is by constantly listing the Herdmans’ antics. Here, Beth recounts how the Herdmans drew pictures on the bald head of Howard, Louella McCluskey’s baby brother. Once again, Beth’s narrative implies that the Herdmans’ pranks, though outrageous, are ultimately benign. Little Howard doesn’t mind being drawn over, even though his mother, naturally, dislikes the prank.

“If Mrs. Herdman didn’t hang around the house much, she didn’t hang around the school at all…and she probably thought PTA stood for Put Trash Away, like the signs on the trash barrels all over town.”

Beth’s statement suggests Mrs. Herdman does not spend much time at home or school, possibly because of her children’s excessive naughtiness. Mrs. Herdman’s lack of interest in school activities is played for laughs with the pun on the PTA, but also contrasts with more involved parents like Beth’s mother.

“Did Imogene know something mysterious that no one else knew? Did all the Herdmans know it, and was that the real reason they were going to stay away? And what did they know? And, most of all, what was going to happen, tonight, at Woodrow Wilson School?”

Robinson often ends chapters on cliffhangers and open-ended questions to build suspense and thrill in the plot. Here, Imogene’s statement that any place would be safer than Woodrow Wilson school tonight evokes a series of questions that end Chapter 6, setting up the reader for the action in the later chapters.

“‘No,’ my mother said […] ‘After all, this Halloween party is for them.’ But it wasn’t, really. It was for the mayor and Mr. Crabtree and the fire chief and the police chief and all the storekeepers like Mr. Kline—everybody who wanted the Herdmans off the streets on Halloween.”

the children, Beth reflects that the people who’ll benefit the most from such a Halloween are the grown-ups themselves. A safe Halloween will bring the grown-ups peace of mind. Beth’s statement unpacks how authority and parental figures can often project their own worries on children and limit their freedoms in the process.

“‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘Do you know of any belly dancers who wear sneakers?’ My mother had said I absolutely could not wear flip-flops with sequins glued all over them. ‘Not in October,’ she said.”

Beth’s decision to dress as a belly dancer shows she has a mind of her own. However, her mother insists she wears the supposedly glamorous costume with sneakers. The contrast between Beth’s vision of a belly-dancer costume and her mother’s sensible rules provides humor and whimsy in the plot.

“The ‘big light’ was Woodrow Wilson School. It was lit up from top to bottom, all bright and cheerful, as if to scare Halloween away and leave a perfectly safe school event—free of shrieking ghosts and rattling skeletons, free of all Halloween tricks and all Halloween candy.

And free of all Herdmans.”

Ironically, though the lights of the school on Halloween night are supposed to signal a party and festivities, for the children the lit-up school is the very opposite of Halloween. Devoid of dark corners and the unexpected, the school is perfectly safe and boring. Beth’s observation that the school is free of Halloween tricks, candy, and the Herdmans illustrates how the narrative associates Halloween with the Herdmans.

“Almost the first thing we saw was scary to me. It was my mother, in a crooked witch hat and her take-out-the-trash sneakers, swooping back and forth in front of the Mystery Maze.”

Beth’s worst fear comes true. Mrs. Bradley does turn up as a witch on Halloween night. The image of her as a witch in “her take-out-the-trash sneakers” is funny, and reflects how embarrassing Beth finds her mother, hilariously “swooping” around. Even the parents, who wanted a safe and predictable Halloween, are getting caught up in the playful spirit of the holiday.

“With nothing scary, nothing spooky, nothing unexpected, no trick or treat and no candy, and not even Herdmans to watch out for, it was turning into the worst Halloween ever.”

As the night goes on, it becomes clear to Beth and her peers that eliminating the Herdmans from Halloween—to say nothing of the candy—has come at a price. As bad as it was to have to relinquish their candy to the Herdmans after a night of trick-or-treating, it’s much worse never to have had the candy at all.

“‘Candy!’ Charlie whooped. ‘Halloween candy! The whole boiler room is full of Halloween candy. I th-th-think it’s…I think it’s…’ He was so excited, he was stuttering. ‘I think it’s all the candy in the world!’”

Charlie’s ecstatic comment on discovering the room filled with candy shows why he symbolizes the innocence and joy of childhood. His delight is doubled because it is unexpected: For much of the novel, the children have been described as searching the supermarkets for candy in vain; now they have an ocean of candy at their feet.

“When Mr. Crabtree showed up and yelled, ‘Where did all this come from?’ Missy Reed told him that it came from the Halloween tooth fairy. It’s a good thing Missy was a first-grader, and cute, because Mr. Crabtree’s ears turned red at the top the way they had when Ollie Herdman wrote the dirty words on Rhoda Gallagher’s turtle.”

Mr. Crabtree’s frustration at hearing the term “Halloween tooth fairy” shows that he is the antithesis of the childlike spirit of whimsy and discovery. Though he is well-meaning, Mr. Crabtree has traveled so far away from the childish world of the imagination that the mention of a whimsical figure nearly turns him purple.

“Stale isn’t very important at Halloween. What’s important at Halloween is amount—how many, how much—and we had more candy that Halloween than ever before…or ever again, probably.”

Since the candy in the boiler room is that which the Herdmans stole from the town’s kids for years, it is stale. However, Beth reflects that being able to eat the candy isn’t entirely the point; the attraction comes from the sheer amount of it. The clarity in Beth’s attitude shows that her priorities are defined, even if they diverge from the adults’ expectations.

“‘Why?’ my mother said. ‘Why do you want to run all over the neighborhood in the dark, and try to keep your costume together, and hang on to your trick-or-treat sack and your flashlight, and then, on top of everything else, stay away from the Herdmans…Why?’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said, after a second.

‘Yes, what?’ Mother said.

‘All that…even the Herdmans.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s what Halloween is supposed to be.’

Good for you, Charlie, I thought, to know that.”

Charlie’s statement and Beth’s endorsement of it constitute the central moral message of the novel: Halloween is incomplete without the Herdmans. Though the Herdmans are unruly and rude and not necessarily worth emulating, they are also adventurous, fun, and a part of the community. Leaving them out of Halloween defeats the very idea of an inclusive social celebration.

“‘Who cares if her ears sizzled and her toes turned blue?’

‘That didn’t happen. She never said it did.’

‘Would have made a better story.’”

This exchange between Beth and Imogene shows that the Herdmans value a good story above anything else. Though Alice never did say her toes turned blue and her ears sizzled, Imogene wishes she had because of the arresting visual it presents. Imogene’s statement is important because it reveals something about the Herdmans’ image. The Herdmans themselves tell outrageous stories about their actions and build their own mythos because such exaggerated, unpredictable stories are fun.