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The F Spot: Digging up Halloween
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All Hallows’ Eve in all
Throughout my childhood, my mother pooh-poohed the whole Halloween subject: It wasn’t Christian, she suspected our neighbors of spiking the mini-Snickers with broken beer bottles, those Michael Myers/Jamie Lee Curtis movies gave my older sisters nightmares, etc., etc. I used to dread the annual trek through our neighborhood, greedy for yet more Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways but blushing miserably under layers of green gook as I lumbered down the street, awash in the headlights of my mother’s car.
No devil-worshiper would get the chance to nab her baby, by God.
It’s a miracle I still celebrate the holiday. In fact, once I freed myself from my mother’s stern finger-shakings and the yellow glare from her Buick Skylark’s headlights, Halloween quickly ascended to the pinnacled position of My Favorite Holiday. It’s not just the scented candles and pumpkin pie or the opportunity to surrender myself to the seductive and cathartic thrill of fear. Nope, I dig the whole concept of All Hallows’ Eve in all its cultural and historic richness.
I tried to explain this to my mother, trying gently to disabuse her of the notion that Halloween sprang, fully grown and garbed, from Lucifer’s head.
“I hate Halloween,” she sighed the other day. “What possesses these kids to dress up like freaks and risk life and limb for a piddly sugar high?” (I didn’t consider her use of the word “possess” coincidental.)
“You know, Mom, Halloween actually has a pretty cool history,” I said. “Did you know it traces all the way back to ancient pagan cultures?”
“Gee, really?” she asked in a classic “duh” tone.
“Way back before Christianity had even popped out of Judaism’s womb, the ancient Celts used to divide their years into quarters, kind of like today’s four seasons. They cooked up holidays to mark the passing of each new season of birth, life, death and rebirth. The Celts considered Samhain [pronounced "sow-in"], which means ’summer’s end’ and represents the birth of their new year, the holiest of these celebrations.
“On Samhain every year, the Celts celebrated their land’s harvest and its subsequent death as it prepared for the new season of life and death. During this time, these folks believed the veil that separates this world and the spirit world grew gauzy, allowing them the opportunity to commune with deceased loved ones, divine the future and see most clearly into the past.”
“The dead people told them their fortunes?” my mother asked.
“I don’t think that was the idea. Unlike us, these people didn’t conceive of time as some kind of unilinear shoestring that…”
“A shoestring?” Mom asked.
“Okay, okay, the pagans understood time as moving in a circle, while modern Western civilization envisions it as a straight and narrow highway to heaven, so to speak. They believed their new year represented the point of intersection between the once-was, the now-is and the will-be. Divining future events and hooking up with representatives from the past didn’t seem so crazy.”
“Okay, so how did this pagan holiday become the Halloween that I know and love?”
“Most historians trace the history of American’s Halloween back to the 1840s, when Irish women and men sifted into America to escape Ireland’s potato famine. They brought with them their ancient myths and rituals, including the celebration of Halloween, now so called because the Roman Catholics couldn’t abolish the pagan celebration and instead renamed it All Saints’ Eve, All Hallows Eve and eventually, Halloween. Calling it ‘All Saints’ Eve’ allowed them to pretend the holiday celebrated their dead saints instead of serving as Europe’s Dia de los muertos.”
“Uh-huh,” Mom said, trying not to look irritated, “so if the church supposedly turned it into a holy day, how come our kids still dress up like devils and vampires and drain all the candy out of the neighborhood?”
“All these wacky traditions date back to ancient practices, although no one seems really to agree which ones. Take the costumes. Some neo-pagans insist this ritual winds all the way back to the earliest Celtic celebration, when children and adults dressed up like fierce goblins and trolls to scare away the evil spirits who joined the dearly departed in roaming our world on Samhain. Others, however, believe the tradition stretches back to ancient Scotland, when women and men commemorated the new year by cross-dressing, maybe in hopes of confusing the evil spirits or maybe just to symbolize the changing of seasons.”
“As for trick or treating, some say it’s a remnant of another Scottish tradition of visiting homes at Samhain and requesting spirits – liquid ones. Others insist it models itself after the ninth century, Catholic tradition of ’souling,’ in which beggars ambled from home to home, promising to pray for the souls of the families’ dead relatives in exchange for some sweet cakes. Still others recall the ancient Celts’ tradition of leaving a plate of grub to nourish their dead relatives’ journeys to and from the spirit world.
“Most historians and neo-pagans seem to agree that the ancients Celts placed candles inside hollowed out turnips in order to light their loved ones’ journey home from the spirit world.”
“So,” Mom slowly began, “we have a holiday that celebrates the pagan new year, marks the time when benign and evil spirits move between their shoestring and ours and encourages our kids to dress up like demons, beg for sweets and scare one another into crying fits because they want to pray for our souls while high on chocolate. Before that night, though, we’ll scoop out a pumpkin’s guts and carve a sadistic visage into it, all to flag our ancestors and invite them to haunt us.”
“Um, kinda,” I said. Why did it sound so much better when I said it?
“Thanks, sweetie, for lifting that cloak of gloom from my shoulders,” Mom said sweetly.
Okay, I failed to embrace my mother within my circle of enthusiasm, but I have next year to convince her. After all, honoring the past and making plans for the future pretty much sums up the whole idea of Halloween, doesn’t it?
Lesleigh Owen