Oct

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Halloween Parade.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 1, 2007 |

As David Skal explains in his book Death Makes A Holiday, Halloween has been around a very long time, although its connections to pagan rituals have been greatly exaggerated and are still poorly misunderstood. He attempts, briefly, to trace the origins of Halloween and some of its rituals, but admits, several times, that source material is scant. While the Celtic holiday Samhain, as well as other harvest festivals, influenced the dating of Halloween, and has been adopted by modern practitioners of Wicca, it bears no resemblance to Halloween. There was also a British tradition of Beggars’ Night, as well as Guy Fawkes, which seem to have influenced modern Halloween celebrations. Other traditions, such as jack-o-lanterns, are apparently Scottish. How these traditions came to the United States and emerged as an almost fully-formed holiday in the early Twentieth Century is, as Skal says repeatedly, a mystery. Instead he devotes chapters to witches (focusing mainly on the Salem witch trials and the subsequent commercialization of Salem’s “witch connection”), haunted houses (getting a pre-party tour of the Playboy mansion), and even Halloween sadism (he uses the introduction to relate the true story of Ronald O’Bryan who poisoned his own son’s Halloween candy to collect insurance benefits). He emphasizes how Halloween has changed, and how much of that change remains the same. In the Great Depression, for instance, Halloween became, to some, a night when tensions between rich and poor turned into open hostility and vandalism, and “cleaning up” the holiday was encouraged. Seventy years later Martha Stewart does a similar clean-up, pretty much taking any fun out of the holiday. As Skal notes, though, the nostalgia adults have for the “good old days” may be more fantasy than fact.

Both the culture of Hallowe’en and its origins are about transformation. Autumn, after all, is a contradictory time when winter is approaching, a time of death for most things, which is the ultimate transformation, but also containing within it the promise of rebirth. It’s a time to reap and to sow. Now, as then, it is a time to confront our fear of death with scary movies, stories, parties, and, of course, costumes.

I’ve seen Halloween have its ups and downs in my lifetime. Trick or treating, something as a kid I looked forward to even more than Christmas, has been in steady decline for decades. Stories of razors or needles or even poison in Hallowe’en candy didn’t stop me when I was a kid–especially since the candy was just a side benefit of being able to dress up and wander the streets at night. As an adult I still use the holiday as an excuse to transform myself. Whatever its origins, it’s become a cultural holiday when it’s acceptable to be something, or someone, we’re not. It’s a freedom many of us crave and need, even if we get it only one day out of the year.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. James on October 2, 2007 3:06 pm

    It is surprising how this has taken off. When growing up Trick or treating was unheard of until my later years. And this from a country that supposedly gave some of its foundation! But the occult is alive and well in England and permeates even daily life, so much so that it sometimes takes an outside observer to point it out.

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