Happy Halloween!
Your Halloween messge from the Pumpkin King:
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. (Is anyone surprised?) Part of the appeal, no doubt was that, growing up in Texas, Halloween was about the time when the oppressive heat finally broke and you were convinced that the earth wasn't going to be scorched into a cinder, at least, not for another year. Here in milder climes, the summer usually breaks sometime in August, by now we're well into cool weather.
But more than the change of the season, Halloween was a time when strange, unusual things could happen. The pattern of ordinariness was disturbed and suddenly your teacher would show up looking like a witch, the check out girl at the store was Wonder Woman, your father turned into a scarecrow. You got to stay up late, wander the streets after dark and eat more candy than everyone knew you should. But more than that, there was the sense that everyone, even the adults, joined in in a delightful game, even if just for one night. I loved the houses that set up graveyards, mini haunted houses, numerous pumpkins or otherwise really got into the night. I was delighted when the adults that passed out candy dressed up too, or tried to scare us with some kind of prank.
The (Catholic) school I attended put on a wonderful Halloween Carnival every year. It wasn't a sanitized All Saint's Day Festival, or a Fall Festival, but a real Halloween Carnival, complete with a haunted house. Everyone came dressed up -- teachers, parents, students and there were no limitations on the kinds of costumes you could wear. There were witches and devils, vampires and princesses. I went as a mermaid one year in a great costume my dad made for me. Perhaps the most original costume I saw over the years was a gumball machine! There were games and a cakewalk (by the way, does anyone do those anymore?), bobbing for apples, a costume contest and, of course, the haunted house. The fifth and sixth graders always got to put on the haunted house, turning the P.E. room into a thing of terror to the younger kids. Looking back, it wasn't anything too elaborate: blacklights, maybe a strobe light, fake blood and cooked spaghetti and peeled grapes, and a bunch of ten-year-olds popping out from behind things, running about screaming, moaning and grabbing passers-by. But it was always the highlight of the Carnival, and the older kids loved putting it on. Fifth grade was by far my best year of gradeschool (maybe of all schooling) and one of the highlights of the year was putting on the haunted house. We started planning it in late September and we all tried to get done with our schoolwork early so we could go string milk cartons together (what the purpose of that was I don't remember) or color huge murals with blacklight crayons.
With this kind of background, it came as a surprise to me that there were people who didn't celebrate Halloween because they considered it demonic or associated with paganism. "C'mon," I thought, "No one takes the ghosts and witches seriously, it's just fun to get dressed up and let yourself have a good scare." In recent years, however, I've heard that point of view more often. At my church, for example, there is an All Saints' party tonight, where people come dressed as a favorite saint. Although no one has said it aloud, the implied sentiment (and sometimes implied sentiments are worse than spoken ones) is that Halloween isn't quite the thing one should be doing. The All Saints parties in past years have been amusing and not unpleasant, but they certainly pale in comparison to my memories of Halloween. There's something missing. I heard someone recently say, as a criticism, "Halloween is a time when people say, 'I'm tired of being good, I'm going to put that aside, just for today.' It's a time when people embrace the things they shouldn't be doing and do horrible things . . ." I just don't think it's that simple.
Halloween, and our celebration of it, is a fairly complex thing these days. Here in America we don't have too many public celebrations, especially ones involving pagentry or creativity. Most of our even semi-public celebrations are, frankly, rather stiff and boring. They don't have to be, but by and large they are. But Halloween, on the other hand, is all about pagentry and surprise. Last year, I think, I happened to be eating in downtown Santa Fe on a Saturday summer morning. As we were leaving the restaurant, I saw a colorfully dressed crowd go by, with floats and banners. Looking closer, I realized that it was Gay Pride weekend, and this was the big parade on its way to the Plaza. Think what you will about the idea of Gay Pride, but it looked like the crowd was having a pretty good time. I thought, "It's too bad that you have to be gay to get dressed up and have a parade." Well, Halloween is pretty much the only time when all of us, straight, gay, male, female, etc., can dress up and be theatrical in a socially acceptable way. A friend of mine who grew up in Italy said that he was surprised to see how people celebrated Halloween here. In Italy, he said, people had festivals and got dressed up in the Spring, usually right before Lent. That way, the merry-making was intertwined with the liturgical life of the church.
It seems that most cultures have some sort of festival where things are not what they seem, a time to get outside your usual roles and routines, a celebration of the unexpected and odd. Halloween is the only thing that even vaguely fills this role in our culture. Perhaps that's why "alternative Halloween parties," such as All Saints parties or Fall Festivals, have always felt flat to me. The idea of an All Saints' party, where one can only dress up as a saint, fails to fulfill this need to embrace, at least temporarily, the unexpected and odd (not the evil and demonic, there is a difference).
Halloween also, even for us unbanized moderns, still in some way marks the change of the seasons. On a vulgar, commercial level, Halloween is the start of the "Holiday" season, albeit perhaps not something to be celebrated as such. It's the beginning of the end of the year, signalling the time to start preparing for a new year. The ancient Celts did this by bringing their flocks down to winter pastures, cutting firewood and deciding which animals would be slaughtered. We order new calendars, buy tickets for Thanksgiving and Christmas traveling and start thinking about Christmas gifts and plans. Pitiful as it is, it's still some sort of marking the change of seasons, moving into a "special" time of the year.
Whatever truly dark side there is to this day, I (thankfully) have no firsthand knowledge of. I've heard from people who claim to know these things that genuinely dark things are done this day and this night. I'll let them have their opinion; that's one google search I don't want to do. But dressing up with red plastic horns and a pitchfork seems miles away from occult rituals attempting to call up and commune with real demons. Evil is real, we see that by reading any newspaper. Real evil isn't about cheap thrills, ghosts and graveyards and such, but about greed, hatred, fear, jealousy, hard-heartedness, addictions, the mundane but horrible things that twist, warp and deform the soul. Real evil kills laughter, companionship and the healthy enjoyment of the gifts God has given us out of His goodness. But real evil isn't what 99.99% of us are celebrating today. For most of us, it's a time to meet our neighbors, practice generosity, and perhaps put our dignity aside for the day and join in the game!
Your Halloween messge from the Pumpkin King:
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. (Is anyone surprised?) Part of the appeal, no doubt was that, growing up in Texas, Halloween was about the time when the oppressive heat finally broke and you were convinced that the earth wasn't going to be scorched into a cinder, at least, not for another year. Here in milder climes, the summer usually breaks sometime in August, by now we're well into cool weather.
But more than the change of the season, Halloween was a time when strange, unusual things could happen. The pattern of ordinariness was disturbed and suddenly your teacher would show up looking like a witch, the check out girl at the store was Wonder Woman, your father turned into a scarecrow. You got to stay up late, wander the streets after dark and eat more candy than everyone knew you should. But more than that, there was the sense that everyone, even the adults, joined in in a delightful game, even if just for one night. I loved the houses that set up graveyards, mini haunted houses, numerous pumpkins or otherwise really got into the night. I was delighted when the adults that passed out candy dressed up too, or tried to scare us with some kind of prank.
The (Catholic) school I attended put on a wonderful Halloween Carnival every year. It wasn't a sanitized All Saint's Day Festival, or a Fall Festival, but a real Halloween Carnival, complete with a haunted house. Everyone came dressed up -- teachers, parents, students and there were no limitations on the kinds of costumes you could wear. There were witches and devils, vampires and princesses. I went as a mermaid one year in a great costume my dad made for me. Perhaps the most original costume I saw over the years was a gumball machine! There were games and a cakewalk (by the way, does anyone do those anymore?), bobbing for apples, a costume contest and, of course, the haunted house. The fifth and sixth graders always got to put on the haunted house, turning the P.E. room into a thing of terror to the younger kids. Looking back, it wasn't anything too elaborate: blacklights, maybe a strobe light, fake blood and cooked spaghetti and peeled grapes, and a bunch of ten-year-olds popping out from behind things, running about screaming, moaning and grabbing passers-by. But it was always the highlight of the Carnival, and the older kids loved putting it on. Fifth grade was by far my best year of gradeschool (maybe of all schooling) and one of the highlights of the year was putting on the haunted house. We started planning it in late September and we all tried to get done with our schoolwork early so we could go string milk cartons together (what the purpose of that was I don't remember) or color huge murals with blacklight crayons.
With this kind of background, it came as a surprise to me that there were people who didn't celebrate Halloween because they considered it demonic or associated with paganism. "C'mon," I thought, "No one takes the ghosts and witches seriously, it's just fun to get dressed up and let yourself have a good scare." In recent years, however, I've heard that point of view more often. At my church, for example, there is an All Saints' party tonight, where people come dressed as a favorite saint. Although no one has said it aloud, the implied sentiment (and sometimes implied sentiments are worse than spoken ones) is that Halloween isn't quite the thing one should be doing. The All Saints parties in past years have been amusing and not unpleasant, but they certainly pale in comparison to my memories of Halloween. There's something missing. I heard someone recently say, as a criticism, "Halloween is a time when people say, 'I'm tired of being good, I'm going to put that aside, just for today.' It's a time when people embrace the things they shouldn't be doing and do horrible things . . ." I just don't think it's that simple.
Halloween, and our celebration of it, is a fairly complex thing these days. Here in America we don't have too many public celebrations, especially ones involving pagentry or creativity. Most of our even semi-public celebrations are, frankly, rather stiff and boring. They don't have to be, but by and large they are. But Halloween, on the other hand, is all about pagentry and surprise. Last year, I think, I happened to be eating in downtown Santa Fe on a Saturday summer morning. As we were leaving the restaurant, I saw a colorfully dressed crowd go by, with floats and banners. Looking closer, I realized that it was Gay Pride weekend, and this was the big parade on its way to the Plaza. Think what you will about the idea of Gay Pride, but it looked like the crowd was having a pretty good time. I thought, "It's too bad that you have to be gay to get dressed up and have a parade." Well, Halloween is pretty much the only time when all of us, straight, gay, male, female, etc., can dress up and be theatrical in a socially acceptable way. A friend of mine who grew up in Italy said that he was surprised to see how people celebrated Halloween here. In Italy, he said, people had festivals and got dressed up in the Spring, usually right before Lent. That way, the merry-making was intertwined with the liturgical life of the church.
It seems that most cultures have some sort of festival where things are not what they seem, a time to get outside your usual roles and routines, a celebration of the unexpected and odd. Halloween is the only thing that even vaguely fills this role in our culture. Perhaps that's why "alternative Halloween parties," such as All Saints parties or Fall Festivals, have always felt flat to me. The idea of an All Saints' party, where one can only dress up as a saint, fails to fulfill this need to embrace, at least temporarily, the unexpected and odd (not the evil and demonic, there is a difference).
Halloween also, even for us unbanized moderns, still in some way marks the change of the seasons. On a vulgar, commercial level, Halloween is the start of the "Holiday" season, albeit perhaps not something to be celebrated as such. It's the beginning of the end of the year, signalling the time to start preparing for a new year. The ancient Celts did this by bringing their flocks down to winter pastures, cutting firewood and deciding which animals would be slaughtered. We order new calendars, buy tickets for Thanksgiving and Christmas traveling and start thinking about Christmas gifts and plans. Pitiful as it is, it's still some sort of marking the change of seasons, moving into a "special" time of the year.
Whatever truly dark side there is to this day, I (thankfully) have no firsthand knowledge of. I've heard from people who claim to know these things that genuinely dark things are done this day and this night. I'll let them have their opinion; that's one google search I don't want to do. But dressing up with red plastic horns and a pitchfork seems miles away from occult rituals attempting to call up and commune with real demons. Evil is real, we see that by reading any newspaper. Real evil isn't about cheap thrills, ghosts and graveyards and such, but about greed, hatred, fear, jealousy, hard-heartedness, addictions, the mundane but horrible things that twist, warp and deform the soul. Real evil kills laughter, companionship and the healthy enjoyment of the gifts God has given us out of His goodness. But real evil isn't what 99.99% of us are celebrating today. For most of us, it's a time to meet our neighbors, practice generosity, and perhaps put our dignity aside for the day and join in the game!
