Recess! Media

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It’s Halloween tonight, and if this ancient holiday is just your cup of tea and sack of candy corn, you might be interested to hear that there’s an entire CD of Halloween music waiting for your trick or treaters. It’s called Spooky Favorites from Music for Little People, and it has a dozen and a half ditties guaranteed to get the ghosts and goblins of the evening rocking on your doorstep.

There are some take-offs on other seasonal favorites, like this send up of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” —

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And there’s a group of traditional ballads like “Old Roger” and “There Was an Old Woman,” and school standards like “Spider on the Floor” and my personal favorite:

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Why do we like to be scared as kids? And why, as adults, should we let our kids be scared? Why do we find the grotesque and goulish so compelling? One of the persuasive psychological arguments is that, once a year, by ritualizing being scared and surviving these emotional upheavals, and by making fun of them, we are actually gaining some control over these forces and training ourselves to cope with the larger frights of life. And maybe there’s a certain logic to that. What could be a better way to gain that mastery and confidence, perhaps, than to whistle or fiddle or sachet our way through it, like the folks on this CD are doing:

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