In the Air

1 Comment

It’s a strange but strong connection.  Between Halloween and me, that is.  I’ve always loved the holiday.  I don’t like being scared, however, and gory horror movies aren’t my favorites.  Still, I’m not alone with my fascination.  Lesley Pratt Bannatyne has written a couple of thorough books on the holiday.  Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night looks at various aspects of Halloween as it’s celebrated in America.  It’s both an imported and exported holiday, of course.  The raw materials came in mostly from Celtic countries—Ireland in particular—and got mixed in with other traditions here before being sent out to the rest of the world as it’s now known.  The thing about Halloween, or any holiday, is that it’s impossible to capture all of it in a book.  Halloween has many associations and a good few of them are explored here. Halloween’s in the air as retail stores know. So let’s take a look.

Bannatyne’s chapters on ghosts, witches, and pumpkins are particularly good.  The pumpkin connection, which is an American innovation, is particularly telling.  It’s been a few years since I’ve carved a jack-o-lantern, but it is one of the fond memories of childhood.  The challenging orange palette that has a wonderful evocative smell and feel.  Bannatyne gives good information about pumpkins and how they’ve become central to the holiday.  Indeed, the symbol that gives Halloween away is the jack-o-lantern.  I found many little gems throughout the book.

Halloween Nation is amply illustrated, in full color, no less.  Bannatyne has a good idea of what Americans do for fun.  Capturing the fulness of the holiday in one book may be impossible, but here you’ll have tours of zombie walks, fan conferences, the Greenwich Village parade, over-the-top haunted house attractions, naked pumpkin runs, and pumpkin beer breweries.  You’ll learn about the history of trick-or-treating and how grown-ups came to embrace what really took off as a day for childish pranks.  Halloween is an expansive occasion.  Holidays also have their own local flavors.  My early memories are of small town celebrations where even poor folk like us could join in the fun.  Nashotah House, for all its problems, did Halloween well when I was there.  To really do it right takes time that seems difficult to come by these days.  It’s just as easy to cue up a horror movie and promise to do better next year.  Still, every year I hope to cut through the jungle of obligations and give the holiday its due.  It’s usually a work day (Tuesday this year), but at least now I’ll be better informed about what I wish I were doing instead.

Early Halloween

1 Comment

Call it seasonal disorientation syndrome, but I’ve been reading about Halloween.  I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one thinking about it.  Stores will begin Halloween displays next month, if the usual pattern recurs.  So why not do a little advanced study?  Although I’ve written about holidays myself, they’re unruly subjects to handle.  Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is a name familiar to many fans of Halloween.  Her 1990 book Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History kickstarted renewed interest in the holiday and has been followed by other studies, even occasionally with academic presses.  Still, holidays are difficult to pin down.  One of the most obvious reasons for this lies in the fact that before the world became über-connected, holidays were largely local celebrations.  Trends traveled slowly and not everybody agreed on which holidays to celebrate.

The early days of Halloween are the most difficult to piece together.  This is clear in Bannatyne’s book also; we simply don’t have the written sources we’d like.  The ancient Celts, although great strides have been made through archaeology and close examination of ancient writings of outsiders, remain poorly documented.  They didn’t leave archives like the classical writers of Greece and Rome did.  And clearly Halloween has its earliest known celebration as Samhain among the Celts.  Once Bannatyne gets to America, however, there’s a trove of information in her book.  Her chapter on the celebrations among the original thirteen colonies is quite good at demonstrating regional differences not only for religions, but for tolerance for something like Halloween.  Fall festivals predated Halloween as we know it (if we really do know it), and she does a good job of demonstrating how the melting pot effect made Halloween national.

One of the problems with any history is that one event can change everything.  This book was written three decades before Covid-19 and the pandemic was one of those events that did change everything.  It makes it seem as if we were much more carefree back in the eighties when Bannatyne’s book was written.  Halloween was just starting to become an adult holiday again back then.  In the ensuing years it has become even more so.  Communities are seldom what they used to be with the extreme mobility of much of our society, but many still find a way to agree to the terms of Halloween.  Historians of holidays have a difficult task, and we’re still learning about ancient cultures and their modern manifestations.  This is a good book to start that exploration—I know it taught me a thing or two.