Something of Halloween originates in the
dark ages of every culture, times when fear and superstition were the
order, and the dead were revered. All societies retain some remnant of this
primitive worship of the dead; a ritual holiday intended to appease the vengeful,
restless spirits and give honor to the bereaved. Halloween itself can be traced back thousands of
years to just such an occasion.
As with many cultures, the Celts of northern Europe
associated death with the dread approach of winter. For them the autumn equinox was considered a time of great supernatural activity and
ominous portent. The superstitions held that restless souls
went in search for new bodies to steal on the evening of Samhain,
translated: "end of summer". To avoid the possible fate
of being demonically possessed in such a manner, the Celts would
parade down the streets donning masks of fearful beasts
and goblins so to keep the dead at bay, bearing torches to draw spirits
away from their homes. Conversely, some Celts endeavored
to consult or manipulate the spirits of the dead through methods of divination
and necromancy.
Bonfires lit up the night sky as all of the home fires
were extinguished in order to make them inhospitable quarters to roving
specters as well as to mark the death of the sun and the advent of an uncertain
winter. At the appropriate time, the fires were relit from the sacred fire of the Druids (the priests of the
Celts) to symbolize a new year. Parcels of food were left on the
doorsteps to appease malevolent fairies looking for treats, lest they
should be tempted to play a nasty trick on the inhabitants. Hungry
children would often dress up as these feared sprites and go door to
door under similar terms, and thus trick-or-treating was born.
It's regrettable that this murky day of the dead is
nearly all of what we've retained of the forgotten religion of the
Celts, who were absorbed into the Roman Empire. The
conquerors of the Celts blended the customs of Samhain with
their own Pomona Day, a harvest festival honoring Pomona (the
"Apple Queen"), goddess of fruits and
gardens. The Romans observed Pomona's Day with feasts and games
and slowly introduced the Samhain traditions of parading in costume,
divination games and "trick-or-treating".
Europe's Dark Ages saw the rise of the Roman
Catholic Church, which co-opted the pagan festival as a means of
converting the largely pagan peasantry and christened it "All
Saint's Day" or
"Hallowmas", from which we get All Hallows Eve, and Hallowe'en.
To heighten it's appeal among skeptical pagans, the Church tacked All Soul's
Day onto the calendar beside it.. This day
for honoring the dead proved imminently more endearing to the commoners than a day honoring distant, Christian
saints, reclaimed the
festival as a night of parades, bonfires, fear and feasting.
The Jack-o-lanterns of old were carved from
turnips since the time of the Celts. In America, the far more
abundant pumpkin was found to be more suitable for carving lanterns for
chasing away the evil dead, if a bit more unwieldy. The name
"jack-o-lantern" comes from an old Irish fable about Mean
Jack, a conniving drunk who trapped the Devil up in a tree and made him swear never to tempt
Jack again. When Mean Jack died neither
Heaven or Hell would admit him, but, perhaps out of pity, the Devil gave
him a glowing coal in a turnip lantern to light his way as he wanders
the Earth looking for a new body to posses.
Though All Soul's Day would still be observed in many
cultures as a religious celebration, the Halloween we now know was
preserved by the Irish more in it's original Pagan trappings. The puritans that colonized America did not bring
with them the celebration of the Pagan holiday so emblematic of the hated
Catholic Church. But in the 1840's,
millions immigrated to America from Ireland in an exodus from that countries devastating
potato famine. These poor but resourceful immigrants brought their native Halloween traditions to
the new world with them. Over the years, Halloween parties became fashionable events in Victorian-era
America, complete with bobbing for apples, games of divination and carving jack-o-lanterns. The Catholic Church began to promote
Halloween as a family affair back in the 1930's and Halloween in America
has grown dramatically as a commercial institution since the Postwar baby boom.
Why I Love Halloween...
When I was about ten, I had this pretty cool Halloween
mask of a rotting corpse with half of it's face plastered with this fluorescent-green
glob-effect, which I assume represented mildew or something. One night, I spotted my
girl-friend next-door-neighbor Jill and her sister Jackie looking for night-crawlers in
their back-yard. It was night-time, (the optimal time for hunting night-crawlers, of
course) and they had only one little flash-light to scan the worm-bed with. It struck me
as a the perfect time to show them my new mask...
I put on the mask, and a camouflage coat, and proceeded
on my mission of stealth, creeping through the dark alley toward their back fence with the
grace of a stalking predator. I had not yet begun to carefully scale the chain-link fence
when Jackie must have sensed something, and trained the puny little flash-light directly
on me. They both got a brief glimpse of me before a startled Jackie flipped the
flash-light about thirty-feet in the air, and they both went into a mad sprint for the
gate. I have never heard such hysterical screaming to this day. I had no chance
what-so-ever to tear off the mask, and show them that it was just little old me before
they streaked out of sight to the front of my house, flailing their arms wildly screaming:
"MR. RING, MR. RING! THERE'S A MONSTER IN YOUR
BACK-YARD!"
I guess this would have been a real hoot, except that I
was almost as freaked out by the whole thing as they were, at first. I scrambled though my
back-yard and my house, to the front-door where my dad was calmly trying to comprehend
both girls manic accounts of what all the to-do was about. I could see that my dad, a WWII
veteran, wasn't quite buying this 'monster-in-the-back-yard' business, in spite of the
sincere recitals of the bug-eyed pair. I blurted out the confession of my misdeeds for all
to hear, trying to be as reassuring as possible, and I remember the look on the girls
faces as reality clicked slowly back into place.
That's the whole point that still amazes- for a
short-while, both of those young women believed in something that they had long-before
been taught didn't really exist. For those magic moments, monsters were part of the
off-camera, real world. That's what has kept me grooving on Halloween all these years.
It's a day for believing in magic. It's the day that you dress up like the monster under
your bed, and experience fear from the other side. On Halloween, we are encouraged to
emulate pagan symbols, and dark spirits, and decorate ourselves and our homes with things
like fake-blood, and cob-webs and stuff that would be disconcerting on any other day. It
still cracks me up, this day that kids are told to dress up as witches and devils and go
door-to-door collecting candy, and play tricks on those who wont give it up.
As for scaring Jill and Jackie- nothing came of it. I was
always doing stuff like that as a kid, and especially around Halloween. The whole month of
October came to a Halloween singularity. I loved to go to Target and Wallgreens and load
up on Halloween stuff. There were wax-lips in various ghoulish styles (including the
Jagger-lips) that tasted like candy, and there were bloody skull-candles, and plastic,
black-widow rings in orange and black, and there were a lot of colorful costumes for kids
of Frankenstien and Superman and cowboys and pirates, and the front of the costume would
usually show the character on the mask, and there were plastic-fangs and tubes of
vampire-blood, and fake scars and dismembered limbs, and those card-board skeletons that
came in three different sizes and everyone hung on their doors, and everything either
glowed in the dark, or made a spooky sound, or stained clothing really badly. Everything
was pumpkin-orange or Frankensien-green, or blood-red, skull-white, or bat-purple. It was
a bliss all my own.
As Halloween is not technically a holiday, most Halloweens I had to go
to school- which was where the festivities really began. You had to guess who was who,
because all of your class-mates were wearing masks just like you, and you learned
something about each one by the Halloween guise they had chosen. And let me say that there
is nothing so quaint as a bed-sheet specter donning a powder-blue over-coat, waiting at
the corner for his mother to pick him up.
Back then, the teachers were happy to pull out all the stops for the
occasion. There was a sumptuous, Halloween spread of fruit, pumpkin cookies, sprinkled
cup-cakes, and punch (usually red). There were plenty of games and activities, (during
which Dracula might get in a knock-down drag-out with a hobo, and the devil might get sent
to the principal's office for jabbing people with his pitch-fork), and ghost stories and
,if we were lucky, a nice little Halloween film-festival to round out the day. Then we all
would walk home with our friends, planning the nights spooky proceedings along the way,
clutching the colorful construction-paper jack-o-lanterns we'd all made in class.
Primed for Halloween, I would take the scenic route home,
taking in the golden glow of Autumn at it's peak, the rustle of dead leaves under my feet,
and the smell of burning leaves in the air. Each home (ideally) had a platoon of
Jack-o-lantern sentries looking impassively out over the street, waiting for the dusk when
their eye's will glow with fire.
And when it was time to start trick-or-treating, we would
make short work of the street we lived on, me and my friends, and sometimes we would put
on on different masks and go back to the houses that had the best candy. We weren't
supposed to eat any candy until our parents inspected it, though we always did- usually by
the fist-full. But we never took apples- everyone knew for a fact that they probably had
razor-blades in them. Eventually we'd wander into neighborhoods where we'd never
trick-or-treated before and we'd kick a few pumpkins, and maybe evade some teen-age
bag-snatchers, and we'd keep going till we found the last house that hadn't run out of
candy. The last house with the porch-light lit. And we were always the last ones to give
up looking.
The last time I went trick-or-treating was when I was
twelve.
Ironically, Halloween Night never seems to quite play-out
for me. Sometimes the weather is too bad, or the Halloween party just goes bust because
it's a weeknight, and nobody can consolidate. Sometimes my enthusiasm runs out- like
eating too much candy too soon. I doesn't help that I never dress up- (I've never enjoyed
attracting that much attention to myself). I suppose it will always be a highly personal
thing to me- a time to gaze through the fantastical prism of childhood for a few fleeting
moments, to remind myself of the magic that once was Halloween. I suppose I will never
give this ritual up, though often disheartening ultimately. Everyone allows themselves to
be nostalgic about something. The elusive dream of Halloween will always be my tradition
to uphold. This year I pay tribute with this web-site, on top of everything else. And
perhaps I'll succeed it recapturing some of that magic, again, and maybe even have fun....
