I Live Here Now: An Emmaus Halloween
Halloween in Emmaus is more of a season than a holiday. Pumpkins appear at the Sunday Farmer’s Market the first weekend of October, and the decorations materialize on Chestnut street before the leaves even begin to turn. People drive from all over the Lehigh Valley to celebrate Halloween here. Emmaus does its very best to welcome the strangers.
It’s been an unusually warm fall, but Emmaus has lashed the season onto the bed of its pickup truck and dragged it into reality. Everywhere you walk, the shops and houses remind you of the coming holiday. Bob Kahle Piano Services puts up a new tableau in their display window (two severed skeleton hands stretched over a dusty set of keys), the Emmaus Bakery turns out fresh pumpkin rolls and pumpkin cheesecake (only $2.50 a slice), and even Montero transforms one of his old violins into a jack-o-lantern. He cuts a nose and mouth into the wood and the instrument glows cheerily through his front window every night. The town at-large finds a brisk new bustle. This is Emmaus’ time to shine.
Emmaus kicks off the festivities each year with its annual Halloween Parade down Chestnut. No matter how early you wake up that Saturday morning, you’ll find the sidewalks already staked out with stretched-to-their-limit towels and determined sets of folding chairs. Bleachers sprout in the Triangle, and all the shops write cheerful welcome greetings on their little chalkboard signs. Tourists—actual Emmaus tourists—wander around all day before realizing that by noon, they’ve already seen everything there is. They stand in circles and argue about where to eat lunch.
Farther south, the creaky war veterans who live by the Pizza Hut come out onto their porches. They settle down slowly into chairs and you have the sense they’ll be there all day, napping on and off, day-drinking their Yuengling beer from the can and waiting for the parade to start. One old-timer, in white sweatpants and a tucked-in white t-shirt, climbs down his steps and spends several minutes placing a proud American flag by his folding chairs. He turns the pole so it waves in the breeze, and he steps back and looks up at it and his mouth hangs open and he furrows his brow and nods.
Sometime in the afternoon, the police block off the street for the parade’s preliminary 5K run. It’s the 10th annual Halloween 5K, and proceeds will benefit the parade itself and the Emmaus Parks system. Runners come in all kinds of costumes. Most are in it for the fun and the photos, but a few take it very seriously. As the crowds begin tracking down their demarcated territories, they watch the runners finish the first few laps. A few of the more experienced runners jump right out ahead, their strides even and mechanical, like puppets. One runner in a bright tank top and jogging shorts easily outpaces everyone. He laps the moms and kids and stroller-pushers several times and doesn’t wear a costume. He takes first place up by the Triangle and then jogs out his cooldown unceremoniously. He spits in the street in front of Montero’s violin shop.
The other runners are much more festive. A father in full Batman armor pushes his baby in a stroller-turned-Batmobile, and both see big cheers from the crowd. A nuclear family of four done up to look like The Incredibles wave and pump their fists as they pass. A certain Gandalf loses a different part of his costume with every lap—his wizard’s staff is the first thing to go—and a mother/son pairing draw some friendly heckles and oh-no-nos for their respective Hillary/Trump outfits. Little kids practice cartwheels in the grass by the CVS (coincidentally, an ambulance waits in the parking lot on standby) and the Emmaus Police Department patrols up and down the street on motorcycles. It’s their busiest night of the year.
The race ends and a black SUV begins patrolling the parade route. Speakers are lashed to the top with bungie cords and the driver yells through a microphone for everyone to find your places and give a big cheer for the Emmaus Halloween Parade! It takes him two tries to coax a response from the crowd. They say there could be as many as 20,000 people here to watch. Kids pack the curbs. Moms and dads hang back and blow on their hands and drink steaming beverages to keep warm. One old man shuffles around and stares at everyone a little too long and takes long gulps from a beer he found. No one’s quite sure who he belongs to and everyone just ignores him after a while. A group of four barely-teenage girls sit on the curb together and pose for a picture. They all smile the same smile and they all wear the same tight cat costume, except for one, who wears a pink unicorn suit instead. Maybe the others didn’t include her in the group text. Maybe they’re phasing her out of the friendship.
The Halloween parade kicks off with the parade chairperson. She sits in a horse-drawn carriage and waves to the crowd. The horse pulling the carriage is black but it’s been painted to look like a skeleton. The parade chairperson isn’t wearing a costume. Behind her come two local political candidates for the November election. They walk behind their respective banners and wave and you can see their teeth when they smile from a long way off. One of the politicians discreetly tosses fun-size candy bars at the kids. He has to be discreet because it’s a new rule this year that no one in the Halloween Parade can pass out candy. In the past, kids have run out to grab candy and almost been hit by cars and floats and horses, so now, no more candy. This decree has caused quite a stir among Halloween Parade traditionalists.
After the politicians, the community floats begin. The Emmaus Halloween Parade has everything you would want in a rural Pennsylvania showcase. There are high school marching bands—including the proud Hornets of Emmaus High—and one adult marching band called the Emmaus Sentinels Drum and Bugle Corp. They really outclass the students; you have to admit. There are flocks of youth athletic clubs, from the tumblers of Parkette Gymnastics (they flip and spin and you pray that none of them wipe out in the middle of the street) to the Emmaus Future Olympians (they stand on a float with a big floppy torch and you look at them and wonder if the expectations aren’t set a little too high). There are, of course, numerous cub scout packs around giant pinewood derby cars, and there’s a Brownie troop too. The Brownie float is made to look like a giant shower, and all the girls dance under the faucet and sing along to the music. You feel gross when they pass.
The Emmaus Halloween Parade has floats for Harry Potter and floats for organ donors. It has baton twirlers and dance studios. Junior football teams—kids in identical skull masks, flexing and looking tough—come before junior cheer squads—lots of tired waving and choreography. Every honk of the horn from Elegant Arrivals Limousines (represented by a stretch Ford Explorer) sees a cheer from the crowd, but every blast from Hillbilly’s Fire Brigade (sirens as bright and loud as a real emergency) sends girls in princess costumes fleeing from the sidewalks, covering their ears and crying. The Emmaus Police Department never stops circling, and every so often the procession will be broken up by a nondescript sedan marked with a paper sign reading “Parade Security.” The crowd recognizes someone on every float. They point and wave and the moms flag down their kids and take pictures and the camera flashes light the whole block.
The procession ends with the Old Time Plow Boys Club, which by far has the largest contribution to the parade. Hunched and overalled old men ride eight mini tractors and five full-size tractors, and their wives sit up on two different floats and gab and gaggle among themselves. After them, a small fleet of Emmaus ambulances bring up the rear, and the parade is over without so much as a goodbye. The crowd packs up at once—chairs are folded, blankets are rolled up and tucked away, Montero puts his arm around his wife and ushers his family inside. An Emmaus Police Department cop wanders back into the street and tries for a few minutes to direct traffic. He leans over and picks up a few pieces of trash but after a moment grows bored and shuffles over to talk to his partner. They stand there with their hands in their pockets and commiserate and try not to look cold. It’s their busiest night of the year.
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Each year, Emmaus selects and announces a very specific night when children will trick-or-treat. This year, it’s the Friday night before Halloween, between the hours of 6pm and 8pm. Road traffic swells around 5pm, when families begin ferrying their children in from Macungie, Allentown, and Trexlertown, and foot traffic swells precisely one hour later. After all, the goal for the kids is to hit as many houses as possible. The goal for the parents is to be back on the road by 8:15 so the sugar high can die off by 9:00.
Trick-or-treaters don’t knock on doors in Emmaus. Instead, kids look for spirited porch-dwellers sitting on their stoops and steps with bowls in their laps, and they run up and hold open their pillow cases and chant and cheer before racing back down the steps to the next house. Most porch-dwellers sit amid bright, festive facades, surrounded by all manner of cobwebs and skeletons and skulls and cats’ eyes. One house features a giant inflatable pirate ship, with two jolly skeletons manning the bow and the wheel. One house has caution tape wrapped all around the porch, and the flower box is dotted with gravestones and skulls. One house, with perhaps the only Clinton/Kaine poster in the entire town taped to its front window, has a jack-o-lantern out front carved to read “D-E-B-T.” The homes feel like they’ve been waiting for Halloween all year, and the people sitting on the steps are flushed and happy and excited to see every kid. It’s mostly women who pass out candy, and many of them wear elaborate and fanciful witch costumes. They smile from beneath their black hats and they give every child a compliment on their positively frightful costume.
The most spirited house in all of Emmaus lies, of course, on Chestnut street. A pirate mans the front gate and hands out candy, and behind him roars a fully-realized haunted house. Strobe lights flash in the windows, spiders and cats perch on the railings, and a pair of witches sit in rocking chairs on the porch and cackle. One of the witches, in a dark sorceress hood, fingers away at a dusty keyboard, and the ancient sounds can be heard from one end of the block to the other. Every now and then a fog machine behind the pirate will hiss and billow chalky white smoke out over the sidewalk. It makes a few people cough.
When you clear the haunted houses on Chestnut and enter the Triangle, there is a bit of a come-down from all the fanfare. A few storefronts offer candy, like the tiny woman outside King Koffee, but so few trick-or-treaters venture this far north that they might as well not bother (all the Koffee lady has to offer anyway are mini-bags of pretzels). Largely, the shops of the Triangle sit lonely and empty, not invited to the party. You might pass a pair of happy witches outside the Emmaus Historical Society (both bowls absolutely heaping with chocolate), but otherwise your only company is the odd family grabbing pizza at Armetta’s or the biker gang chugging beer and bumming cigarettes next to 187 Rue Principale, the locally-sourced bistro.
The Emmaus teenagers roam in packs tonight. They wear hoodies and dark jeans and bandanas and they walk around and scowl and eat stolen candy out of their hands. If you catch one alone they’re usually heading to their cars or trucks where they’ll climb in and gun the engine and peel away and make a scene in front of all the little kids. Most of the teenagers are down at the high school anyway, where the Hornets are playing their last regular season football game. You’ll find all the EPD patrol cars down at the high school too, which serves to remind you that after the game, most of the students are going to drive to a Halloween party and drink underage and try weed for the first time. You wonder if the cops will bust any of them. For some reason, you hope not.
Walking back toward town, you can see that many of the houses off Chestnut are dark and quiet. More often than not, the front doors are open, and as you pass you might feel a voyeur’s urge to peek inside. The interiors are all silent and still. A light or two is on but there’s no sound and no movement, not even a television set. There’s a creeping feeling and a shiver. You imagine things and hurry along and the hair on your neck might prickle, like the house knows what you saw.
As the night winds down and the trick-or-treaters make last-gasp dashes back to the good houses, there are small reminders that Emmaus will wake up. There’s a light on in Jonny’s Barbershop. He’s standing there and brushing a fresh-cut fade and peering over the top at his homies; everyone laughs and sits around and makes jokes in Spanish. There are a few women at Secret Nails & Spa; the bright light spills through the window and falls on the untouched bowl of candy they left on the sidewalk. The cases in Emmaus Bakery sit empty behind the window, and the sign says they’ll be closed on October 31. Montero turned the light on in his violin shop, and his homemade violin jack-o-lantern sits faded and forlorn by the front door. The sounds of the children laughing are cut by the train rattling and roaring down the tracks once again.
You stop by the fire escape. It’s a cold night. The wind rustles through the autumn trees and the leaves stir in the street. The kids laugh and their final footsteps pound the pavement. Car engines turn over. The teenagers’ halting guffaws can be heard from further down the block. Headlights make the turn and rush past and disappear over the hill. Halloween in Emmaus is almost gone. A sigh lets out. The darkness deepens and the air moves past your face. It smells like bonfire smoke, exhaust, and if you close your eyes, just a hint of chocolate.