So it's been a quiet Hallowe'en.
It runs hot and cold in our neighbourhood. Some years, we get a hundred kids. This year, we haven't cracked a dozen. Which means, come Monday, it's gonna be a party for chocoholics 'round here, as the piled up candy bars gotta go somewhere.
Though my guess would be it's mostly the drizzly weather that's doing this, one kid at the door opines that some folk might be staying away 'for religious reasons'. Seein' as it's Sunday and all.
This, I imagine, might be contributing somewhat, though it's been this quiet before, on evenings this wet.
It would at once amuse and annoy me, mildly, were this kid's guess to prove correct. The offense taken by certain Christians over the Hallowe'en traditions--and particularly the machinations of those who want to 'purify' the holiday--by turning it over to such 'acceptable' pursuits as (yipee) bible studies and the like--actually strike me as simultaneously obnoxious and suggestive of a deep insecurity. The fact that some of their number seem to feel as though
any fun any member of the human species might have, if it does not meet with their narrow little minds' approval, is suspect enough to be banned--this fact makes me wonder: what, exactly, are these buggers afraid of?
Hallowe'en as we now celebrate it in Canada and the US is an actually rather fun holiday for kids. And levity, naturally enough, is the enemy of authoritarianism. And I think beyond that there are really two reasons Hallowe'en bothers these folk so much:
- It still carries so many traditions of its pagan predecessor, Samhain, and
- The overtones of those traditions carry meditations on themes with which modern Christian culture especially has simply never been particularly comfortable.
Samhain, to give you the capsule summary of stuff you probably already know, was celebrated by ancient Celtic cultures as the first day of winter, and was considered to be a sort of magical time, as the end of the year, a day in neither world, when the doorways between this world and the next stood open, and the souls of the dead were free to visit the living. The Christian church long ago managed to partially subvert the celebration by setting 'All Saint's Eve' at the same time, but a lot of our persistent Hallowe'en traditions, though now somewhat mutated, come originally from rites related to this belief.
And thus the 'dark' symbolism of the holiday--skeletons and ghouls, ghosts and witches--though a kitsch latex quality has invaded it of late, it's still a day for the dead as much as for the living.
The old Celtic traditions have an alluringly anarchic quality about them--a quality which, I think, touches something in people. It certainly has appeal. In our neighbourhood, there are those who really go to town this eve--elaborate graveyard scenes on the front lawns, witches suspended in the branches of trees--and the jack'o'lanterns are frequently real works of art, laboured over with much love.
Trying to grasp why this is, I find myself suspecting it has something to do with the degree to which our culture detaches itself from death, most of the time. It's something we shut away into quiet, overdecorated rooms, and quilted shrouds. The superstitions promulgated by the dominant religions go further still, and try to deny death entirely, offering eternal life (in exchange for appropriate levels of grovelling to the deity, and obeisance to the creed, of course). The reality of death gets exchanged for tanned seniors at a retirement home which might be somewhere in Florida, except for the clouds and harps.
The old Samhain traditions, on the other hand, are dark with uncertainties; a slight overhanging menace pervades them. And the human unconscious, it seems, is inclined to think this more appropriate than platitudes about grandpa going to a better place. And though I'm no pagan, and have no belief that the dead are wandering about out there in any literal sense (and, unlike certain of the religious, I'm not looking for them in some afterlife harp ensemble either), I feel that too. Hallowe'en, besides actually being a bit of fun, and a great excuse for a little zaniness (last year, I went to a party as Dubya, and
that, my friends, was scary), just seems such a perfectly appropriate way to pass the end of October, the summer flowers dying, the nights growing darker, the leaves falling, the winter on its way.
Some of the folk howling to emasculate Hallowe'en, I suspect, are bothered by this in ways they themselves don't really fathom. They probably know, on some level, that their religion's yearning, really rather childish platitudes about eternal life are a poor answer for the reality we all face, and it rather pisses them off that in its unthinking, unconscious way, the pop culture traditions that evolved out of the pagan ones now provide rituals that provide an answer a lot of people like a little better. Thus the hysteria about 'Satanism' that always hangs in the air around this season. Thus the puritanical zeal to kill off even these faint, glimmering vestiges of a tradition that is one of the very few things that survive from an older, rival religious tradition--a tradition otherwise almost entirely exterminated.
Anyway, those that came to our door this evening were well rewarded with chocolate, as we could be afford to be generous, with so few. I'll leave you with the following rant, from my sent mail file from a year or two ago, on the same subject, in reaction to some of the same silliness:
Our topic for the night is fundamentalism. Defined as that nagging fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. Did you know that Hallowe'en is the 'highest holy day for Satanists'? Oh, but you can read all about it at...
http://bozman.net/glory/halloween.html
... apart from more than a few other similar pages. I actually found this gem looking for another, actually rather funnier (though about as scary) example someone had sent me, as I wished to send it to you for entertainment value. Finding it again, however, was not unlike looking for a needle in a haystack. A really psycho, paranoid haystack. We have met the enemy. And they are freaks.
Christian fundamentalists. Gotta love 'em. Not satisfied with brutally crushing almost all vestiges of other cultures so careless as to cross their path, they actually gotta try to get it done in entirety. 'What? Those damned druids are still sending out their kids to extort food from their neighbours? The cheek. Haven't they noticed their civilization (if the term is appropriate) is extinct? This won't do! Write a web page! ...'
If I do manage to escape to a Hallowe'en party, I'm comin' as a glazed-eyed, Brylcreemed bible thumper (assuming the stores still carry Brylcreem and eye glaze around here, as to the bible, I'm not sure if I've got one kicking around, but I figure a leather-bound copy of some cheesey Sidney Sheldon novel, as literature of similar quality, would probably serve). Or do you s'pose showing up at the door with anti-abortion literature replete with the 'mutilated fetuses' that are peculiar to the genre, along with badly-written and even-more-poorly drawn evangelical comic strips would be in poor taste? Maybe inappropriate for children? Hell, maybe even inappropriate for adults. Scarring, even, I shouldn't wonder.
I wish this crowd could just face it. If it weren't for the pagan cultures whose traditions they had to subvert, Christian holidays on their own would (as the kids of South Park would have it) suck ass. Whereinhell would Christmas be without the mistletoe, the tree, the ritual exchange of embarassing sex toys (or, at least, that's my family's approach, but we also follow the ancient midwinter tradition of getting really, really drunk before we go shopping)? And what would we be doing on the conveniently-placed 'all saint's eve' if the god squad had the only say? Arguing over our favourite saint? 'Yeah? Oh yeah? Well I bet Saint Therese could kick Saint Geneve's bony ass... yeahhhh boyeee... you want some of this? You want some?...'
No. Fact is, it wouldn't even be that interesting. We'd all be holed up in a church basement somewhere, bobbing for communion wafers, thinking damn, if only the Celts had won, I could be french-kissing that hot young soprano in the choir under the mistletoe... or chasing her around a Halloween party dressed as a spermatozoon... but either way, really.
Evening. And if I don't see you on The Festival of the Evil One (Halloween, not Bill Gates' birthday), egg a street preacher for me, would you?
That's all. Merry Samhain, all the best to the dead and the living.
