Shaping Halloween

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Halloween is the favorite holiday of many.  I suspect the reasons differ widely.  Although the church played a role in the development of this celebration, it didn’t dictate what it was to be about.  It was the day before All Saints Day, which had been moved to November 1 to counter Celtic celebrations of Samhain.  Samhain, as far as we can tell, wasn’t a day to be scared.  It commemorated and placated the dead, but it wasn’t, as it is today, a time for horror movies and the joy of being someone else for a day or a few hours.  There isn’t a preachiness to it.  Halloween is a shapeshifter, and people love it for what it can become.  If December is the month for spending money you haven’t got, October is the month for spooky things.  Halloween is the unofficial kick-off of the holiday season.

For me, it’s a day associated with dress-up and pumpkins.  Both of these bring back powerful childhood memories.  The wonderful aroma of cutting into a ripe pumpkin can take me back to happier times.  I remember dressing up for Halloween as far back as kindergarten.  I could be someone else.  Someone better.  It was a day when transformation was possible.  I’m probably not alone in feeling this, although I’m fairly sure that wasn’t what was behind the early use of disguises this time of year.  I’ve read many histories of Halloween and they have in common the fact that nobody has much certainty about the early days of its inception, so it can be different things for different people.  Even within my lifetime is has moved the needle from spooky to scary, the season of horror movies and very real fear.

There’s a strange comfort in all of this.  A knowledge that if we can make it through tonight tomorrow will be somehow less of an occasion to be afraid.  It is a cathartic buildup of terror, followed by the release of being the final girl, scarred, but surviving.  And people, from childhood on, enjoy controlled scares.  Childhood games from peek-a-boo to hide-and-seek involve small doses of fear followed by relief.  The future of the holiday will be open to further interpretation as well.  As a widespread celebration it is still pretty young.  And like the young it tests its limits and tries new things.  At this point in history it’s settled into the season of frights and fears in the knowledge that it’s all a game.  I wonder, however, if there isn’t some deeper truth if we could just see behind its mask.

Booking Halloween

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I’ve met several people who say that Halloween is their favorite holiday.  One of the (likely commercially-driven) realities, however, is that not many nonfiction books on Halloween exist.  I mean the kind with a known publisher behind them, the sort that have been vetted.  My recent book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has a chapter on Halloween in it, and I’ve often considered writing a book on the topic.  Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life is an edited collection brought together by Jack Santino.  It is one of the (few) academic books on Halloween that I hadn’t read.  Although I learned a lot from it, it suffers that inevitable trait of books that are assemblages of essays: they are uneven in focus, scope, and execution.  Santino is known for a couple of influential articles on Halloween, so editing such a book seems a natural development.

Some of the essays in this book were quite helpful to me.  The problem with drawing together anthropologists, however, is that they have discrete regional as well as thematic interests.  In some ways this is very appropriate for Halloween.  The holiday, as most holidays, has regional variations.  Reading about how it’s celebrated elsewhere, or elsewhen, gives you an idea just how lacking it is of any kind of “top-down” authority.  For all of its variations, Christmas has a somewhat “canonical” narrative (although this isn’t the full story).  Halloween grew from folk traditions and when the church got ahold of them it tried to focus them on All Saints Day, and later, All Souls Day.  But Halloween and it adjutants comes the day before All Saints, thus allowing the varied influences of the day to come to light, if they can be found.

The part of this tradition that I’ve always found disturbing, highlighted in this book, is the pranking.  I suppose that growing up poor, the idea that someone could damage your stuff when it’s really what you feel you need to survive, is quite distressing.  A light-hearted prank feels less insidious, but reading what some regional celebrations in North America included made me realize why many local authorities have tried to contain and control celebrations.  Nobody wants to lose everything due to a thoughtless prank.  Trick or treat was sometimes trick and treat.  I recall being in a crowd in England celebrating New Year’s.  Some partiers threw lit firecrackers into the crowd.  My only thought was to the damage or injury this might cause.  Halloween is that way, however.  And it is likely impossible to write a book that captures it in its fullness.

This Is Halloween

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He was probably trying to impress his wife with his wit.  I was in a department store—a rarity for me.  I was wearing a mask, because, well, Covid.  As this guy, older than me, walked by he said “Halloween’s over.  Take off your mask.”  It bothers me how politicized healthcare has become, but what bothered me more was that it was only October 20.  It wouldn’t even be Halloween for another 11 days.  What had happened to make someone think Halloween was over so early?  Yes, stores had switched over to Christmas stuff by then.  In fact, I wandered into another store where Christmas carols were playing.  Capitalism seems to have wrenched the calendar out of order.  We’re tired of All Hallows Eve before it starts.  In fact, just the day before we’d gone out to a pumpkin patch to get our goods and the carved pumpkins are now showing their age.

If that little exchange in the store had been in a movie, it would’ve been a cue for me to transform into some big, scary monster.  Of course, Halloween is what it is today because of relentless marketing.  And a handful of nostalgia from people my age with fond childhood memories of the day.  For some of us, however, it is a meaningful holiday in its own right.  It makes us feel good, even after we’ve grown out of our taste for candy.  It is significant.  Christmas is a bit different, I suppose, in that there is nothing bigger following, not until next Halloween.  Besides, Christmas is supposed to go for twelve days.  The fact that Halloween is a work day makes it all the more remarkable.  We have to work all of this out while still punching the clock.

I had really hoped to be able to get to Sleepy Hollow this Halloween.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth tries to make the case of how that story and Halloween came of age together.  It is the iconic Halloween story, what with ghosts and pumpkins and all.  And the month of October is spent with scary movies for many people.  This month I’ve posted about horror movies every other day, pretty much, trying to connect with my audience.  If that is my audience.  I tend to think of Halloween as a community.  Those of us who, for whatever reason, think of this as our favorite time of year.  A time when perhaps we don’t feel so stigmatized for liking what we do.  A time that we’re not hoping will shortly end so we can get onto the next thing.  It may have been meant as a joke, but I wasn’t laughing.  Happy Halloween!

Summerween

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Okay, so why didn’t anybody tell me?  Well, I suppose it’s because few people know me.  But still, I had to find out about Summerween from the New York Times.  Folks, I don’t spend a lot of time online.  I work long days and I read books and mow the lawn.  I just don’t have time.  I wasn’t aware that Summerween was happening.  Interestingly, the idea got started from Gravity Falls, an animated television show based on Twin Peaks and The X-Files.  I actually watched this show because a couple of young friends, who spend a lot of time online, started showing it to me.  I didn’t remember, however, that in one episode the population of Gravity Falls decides to celebrate a second Halloween in the summer.  And now internet influencers (I’m more of an unfluencer) are popularizing the holiday.  

The need for spooky holidays is encouraging to me.  I’ve long been exploring the spirituality of the unexpected, and Summerween has the possibility of contributing to it.  According to the New York Times article there’s no set date for the celebration.  It’s more of a party aesthetic, but, the story notes, Michaels, the arts and crafts chain, has already caught on and is stocking scary summer decorations.  I have long opined (and fifteen years is a lot of daily posting—nearly five-and-a-half thousand of them) that people are afraid.  That’s why they run after unlikely political leaders and seek shelter beneath the wings of the Almighty.  Horror movies, and Halloween, simply bring this out into the open.  And what’s wrong with having a little fun with it along the way?

By the by, if you haven’t checked out Gravity Falls, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s a Disney production and it’s aimed at a younger crowd.  That’s one of the disconnects I experience here: Halloween is something younger people love.  At work I can’t count the number of people who’ve said (not to me directly, since few speak to me that way) that Halloween is their favorite holiday.  I guess you wouldn’t expect to find a kindred spirit among old guys who edit biblical studies, of all people.  I venture to guess that any of them would be surprised to learn that someone of my vintage even knows what Gravity Falls or Summerween is.  Well, they’d have been right about the latter, had it not been for an article yesterday in the Gray Lady.  And what a more adult way to find something out might there be?

Copyright: Disney. Summerween trickster, Gravity Falls

For the Music

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Believe me, I’ve tried.  I took a year of piano lessons but just couldn’t get it.  I married a musician.  I tried to learn guitar.  (I would still play with it, but I broke a string last time I tried to tune it and who has time to get to a music store where it can be restrung?)  I can’t sing—I’ve never been trained and I just don’t seem to have the voice for it.  (In fact, since I no longer teach those close to me say I speak so softly that it’s a strain to hear me.)  But the fact is I love music.  That’s why I don’t listen to it as background.  If there’s music playing, that I like, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else.  It goes directly to my brain, it seems.

My memory is such that if a piece of music is too familiar I sometimes just don’t want to hear it.  I’m also out of touch with contemporary music.  I have strong tastes, and not too much appeals to me.  When something does, it’s transcendent.  It’s like I’ve fused with the performers.  It’s mystical and amazing.  Growing up, we couldn’t afford much in the way of records.  (I’m sure I need not say anything about cassette or 8-track tapes.)  I listened to the radio with my brothers from time to time, and enjoyed what we heard.  I secretly enjoyed what I heard coming from my older brother’s room.  Left to my own devices, however, I tend to pick up a book and I can’t listen to music and read at the same time.  I know that this is my own neurological issue, but I’m letting you in because anything transcendent is worth sharing.  

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Although the quality isn’t as good, services such as Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited have slowly introduced me to music of the nineties and later.  Why the nineties?  That’s when I began teaching and my spare time was spent researching (reading) and I had little time for other diversions.  You see, music may just be what it’s all about.  It’s being absorbed and enjoying every second of it.  Humans are visually oriented, but when we focus on sounds something happens to us.  I can be in a crowded store and stop dead right in the middle of the aisle if one of my special songs comes on in the background.  I have to stand and listen, shopping forgotten.  Transcendent moments are few.  If we were in transport all the time I fear it would become ordinary.  And such things are worth pondering on Groundhog Day.