The Village Halloween Parade is one of New York City’s most cherished cultural rites, drawing people from all over the city—and all over the world, to participate in a celebration of freedom, fantasy and fun. 

Each year it is an eye-popping extravaganza—building-high skeletons, leering monsters, floats and bands of all kinds. But amidst all the high-end Saturnalia, you can still glimpse parents and their children in bedsheets, and hastily concocted monster suits. It is a parade for everyone at a time when exclusion seems the order of the day. The parade’s website reminds us, in Lewis Carroll’s words, that “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

WNSR’s Sarah Montague is a Greenwich Village resident, and makes a point of attending the parade each year.