The little boy walks the sidewalk, eyes bright in his Buzz Lightyear costume, eyes bright for the free candy. Halloween has come to downtown, safe daylight event replacing the freewheeling buccaneer spirit of going house-to-house as tradition demands. He is followed by a little Super Mario and yet another "bleeding" ghost face. Only 20 minutes into Hollister's Trunk or Treat and it is time for a candy bucket refill. The crowd is huge.
Halloween is upon us; time of expensive candy and hyper children in costume, of spook houses and taffy apples, of big animatronic werewolves and face paint and a plethora of field pumpkins slowly rotted in their face-carved glory by the near- summer heat.
Halloween is a contentious holiday, especially in the Bible Belt, especially after fears of Satanism that arose in the 1980s. Threats of witchcraft and paganism drive the church to embrace the now-popular "harvest festival" and the only ghost allowed is the Holy one. My love of Halloween often gets me funny looks and occasionally oblique criticism.
Few know my own wrestling with the holiday, how I loved it as a child, how I feared it as a teenager after one of my cousins was gunned down on a country road for having learned too much of a cornfield cult that was making strange fires and sacrifices within a gravel road grove. Nonetheless, the potency of the night remained and, in time, I walked away from the old fears, embracing both my childhood and my ancestral traditions.
Halloween is a portmanteau of "[All] Hallows Eve," which explains the oddly placed apostrophe in the old spelling: Hallowe'en. High church in the British Isles created the night, an evening to "hallow all" before night slipped into the dawn of All Saints Day. But the holiday was crafted over the far-older Samhain (generally pronounced "Sah-wen" or "Sow-ween" in places like Ireland and Wales).
And Halloween is, first and foremost, a sacred Celtic event, a night revered as a celebration of death. The purported "ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties"are said to gad about the neighborhood because it is this night the veil betwixt this world and the next has thinned. High above, the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters star constellation, rises at midnight, reminder of a night like this, long ago, when the world itself was plunged into darkness and loss.
Death does that. Stops time. Creates a permanent "before" and everlasting "after." The world is never the same again, not after death. Not after loss. The world of modernity reacts to grief with strange and plastic artificiality. Concerning paradox indeed, as the modern church has stripped away Halloween and with it the celebratory passion play of death.
Faced with incomprehensible loss? Just pray about it. Gaping hole left in your heart? Just thank God they're in heaven; they're probably better off anyway. Cataclysmic and cosmic loss are reduced to a trite card on a shelf and perhaps a well-meaning casserole before the business of self-importance returns.
In a world where death is sidelined, life becomes overlooked, expected to last in some strange and tedious forever. Neglect breeds indifference, callousness, a strange lack of magic. No wonder J. K. Rowling's work was so popular, siren call to walk away from a muggle's life, eyes opened to a world of enchantment, possibility and yes, even danger. The beings that walk the edges of the underworld remind us life is precious, remind us to tread the world with weird care. The fairies of old demand no less.
And so, this Halloween, I will celebrate quietly, reverently, cooking the foods of my past, remembering my childhood with love. There will be no horror movies (though I sometimes like those) and no jump scares. But I will think back to a jack o'lantern lighted and grinning from an old elm stump in the back yard, of homemade semisweet chocolate fudge and chili and rice crispy candy and of bonfires near the hedge trees.
And there I will light candles honoring my ancestors, good Celts nearly all. I will honor their lives, remembering the mothers, the fathers, the poets, the shaman druid priests, the warriors of old, here, now, as the veil thins, at my own crossroads of the soul. Those countless lives lived made my own possible and for that I am grateful. This is the road less traveled, melancholic and hopeful, the end of one year, the beginning of the next, another night, another day, never to be forgotten.
Laughter on Downing Street snaps me back from my reverie. The crowd has thinned, raucous family fun winding down. I realize I am out of candy and my Cernunnos antlers are slipping from my head in the sweaty evening heat. Another All Hallows is passing on, forever, into eternity.
Comments