Jackpot House
By Soryn Cline she/her
When Halloween landed on a Friday or Saturday night when I was in elementary school, it meant one thing: we were going to the Jackpot House. The notorious and elusive house was always something spread by word of seven-year-old mouth, especially because parents despised the idea of it. Spending upwards of two hours for their kid to stand in line and receive food and candy from a suspected hoarder, was not always their idea of Halloween night - nd yet, each year students from Ivanhoe, and other Silver Lake schools, would drag their discontented parents up the dimly lit hills to the House.
The very premise of the House compromised the traditional idea of Halloween. In Gen X parental eyes, Halloween is all about accumulating the variety of cavity-inducing treats from multiple houses, not waiting for two hours on a stranger's lawn to get it all in one go. For those unaware of this local anomaly until reading this, allow me to enlighten you. Halloween night was defined by two factors for a good majority of my elementary years: Angus Street and Kit-Kats. To maximize your sugar intake, it was recommended by Jackpot House “veterans”, to blow through the main Halloween street, Angus, and hightail up a side street until you saw a line of children accompanied by aching feet, and irritated parents. Once you made it to the front door, your enthusiasm now dwindled with the wasted time, you’re asked a series of questions regarding food preferences, by none other than the unnamed owner of the house. Met by a wall of fifty unopened Petco fish bowls behind the home-owner, a stream of candy, chips, and king-sized candy bars in your bag, you begin to ponder if the hours-long wait was worth it, just as your mom simultaneously yells, “Never again!”
While I only ever endured this feat twice, I have yet to find another Halloween experience that gave me the same sense of childhood wonder and sentimentality that the House did the first time. As I grew older, my views towards the holiday tended more towards a longing for a recreation of that naïve childhood feeling, than a sparkling new definition of what the date meant to me. There is no clear-cut definition of what the holiday means to each of us as individuals; my definitions have been ever-changing in a shared hope to hold on to a feeling of ingenuous wonder and excitement.
I’ve found that with age, my views of the holidays have become increasingly cynical and melancholic - more than just typical seasonal depression. I don’t consider myself a cynic; maybe this is a part of growing up, aging into a loss of wonder and an increase in bitterness. In retrospect, the premise of the Jackpot House may have been the final factor that smothered the last sparks of childhood Halloween nostalgia for these parents. A spark that is the antidote for creeping cynicism and melancholy. While the Jackpot House may have been a notion that spoiled the traditional and nostalgic feeling of Halloween for local middle-aged parents, the factor that will be the ultimate demise of my nostalgia is time.
