Hark, what goes there?—Halloween?
What do we celebrate with when we celebrate Halloween?
According to a survey done at the behest of the National Retail Federation, which really wants to know how much Americans spend, and how, when, and on what they spend it, Americans are expected to spend a record $12.2 billion dollars celebrating Halloween this year, up from last year’s nearly $11 billion. An amount exceeding the combined annual GDPs of Montenegro and Andorra, it is roughly equally divided over three categories: costumes, decorations, and candy. (The $4 billion or so we’ll spend on Halloween candy is itself greater than the entire economic output of Belize.)
Granted, this is but a thimbleful in the bucket needed to hold U.S. annual retail holiday spending over the months of November and December—which, per another NRF survey, is going to come close to $270 billion. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, here we come.
But what are we celebrating? Well, like the nutritional value of the candy, it’s not much, it seems. First, though, maybe we should consider where what some consider the second-favorite American holiday comes from.
The history of the holiday, like its current meaning, is neither deep nor broad. It’s generally thought that it grew from an ancient Celtic celebration called Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-en’, rhymes with now-in, these days, taking it from Irish Gaelic, though the older Scots Gaelic pronunciation would be more like ‘sauh-vin’, or so I’ve been told). Samhain was a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and/or the beginning of the darker season of the year, occurring more or less around what is now the end of October/first of November. According to some histories of Irish mythology, Samhain was a feast or festival of the dead. Generally, the festival included feasts and fires, and, per that Irish mythology and stories of the druidical era, visits by the souls of the dead, as well as fairies, devils, and the like. Masks were worn to protect the living from the nefarious works of fairies, discontented ghosts, and (maybe), per the Druids, visitation from Saman, the lord of death, who came to collect the souls of the wicked who had recently died—and perhaps some who hadn’t yet. (This last bit is contentious—some, generally apologists or fellow-travelers for/with pagan, wiccan and druidical practices, fans, and devotees, maintain that there was no such Druid ‘god’. As best I can tell at present, it seems there probably was a Druid character of the name and sort, though exactly how it all played out is difficult to discern. Protests that Samhain ≠ Saman, or that Druids didn’t have a god of the dead or whatever, seem to me a bit like hand-wringing anxiety that one’s not-entirely-welcome guests will notice The Wiccan Book of Spells on the shelf. The masks as protection from evil-doers from the dark world or the ‘other side’ is a widely accepted notion, however.)
When Christianity was brought to the Celts around the 8th/9th century or so, church higher-ups decided to commandeer existing pagan festivals and rebrand them as Christian holidays. Thus, All Saints’ Day, which had just a century or so before been initiated and placed in May, was moved to November 1, there coinciding with the festival Samhain. The two more or less merged, and the preceding day was dubbed All-Hallows Eve, eventually transmuted into Hallowe’en and finally Halloween. The Celts’ tradition was gradually diluted by church and colonizers’ customs, but with some retention of things like bonfires, celebration of harvest, and avoidance of evil spirits—the last being one of those things humans seem innately to feel the need to do.
After the Reformation, most Protestant denominations abandoned Halloween and All Saints’ Day, but the Roman Catholic church, unsurprisingly, kept them, with the latter retaining greater importance. All Saints’ Day remains one of a modest number of major Catholic church days on their calendar.
In colonial America, with the dominance of Protestant churches and Puritans and the like, Halloween was generally either forbidden or at least forgotten. (The obvious exception being Maryland, where the Catholic church was prominent/dominant.) Only in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with a surge of Irish Catholic immigration, did Halloween again arise as a holiday across the rapidly-growing U.S., with British-Irish customs such as trick-or-treating, the carving of jack-o’-lanterns, and costumes becoming fashionable. Pranks, too, were part of the package, and as time went on, pranking sometimes got more than a little out of hand, leading to backlash, official and otherwise, against the holiday, with an emphasis made by some on making the holiday one for the children. The trend was one of migration from religious to secular.
This being America, anything ‘for the children’ was destined to become popular. In the 1950s, mass-produced costumes became widely and cheaply available, and trick-or-treating by kids began to take off. In 1966, a year after the premiere of the TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Peanuts producers gave the world It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
Unlike the Christmas special, which includes some very clearly Christian bits about ‘the meaning of Christmas’, the Great Pumpkin special is notable for its complete lack of religious referents. The main threads of the show are the gang trick-or-treating (an activity which features Charlie Brown routinely and famously receiving rocks instead of candy) and then going to a simple fun-and-games party, Linus (accompanied by the cynical and skeptical Sally) waiting in a pumpkin patch for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, who is to give toys to all the children, and Snoopy as a World War One Flying Ace who gets shot down by the Red Baron, sneaks his way back through enemy lines, and finally arises in the dark of the pumpkin patch and causes Linus to faint at the sight of what he believes to be the Great Pumpkin rising up from said patch. Oh, and there’s the tossed-in bit where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick, with the expected result—Lucy retracts the ball at the last second, Charlie Brown’s foot swings through empty air, and he goes flying and lands with a thud on his back. Nowhere in this Peanuts Halloween TV special is there anything remotely resembling even just a nod to a reason for the holiday, religious, secular, metaphysical, whatever.
So, there are parties, trick-or-treating, which is (or at least should be) basically an under-age-12 activity, and decorating with ugly/scary/morbid items and themes. Sometimes the decorating is toned down for the youngsters, as in the blow-up display seen just below, or the typical jack-o’-lantern, which isn’t high on the ugly/scary/morbid scale. The theme of Halloween decorating, however, still strums the strings of fear: ghouls, ghosts, goblins, gore, demons, and death dominate. And spiders. Spiders are approaching ubiquity in Halloween decorating, the idea being, one supposes, to take advantage of our innate repulsion by creatures with too many eyes, too many legs, venom, and fangs.
What, though, are we celebrating? I was walking the dog very recently and came across a neighbor having on a leash a shih-tzu with an attitude. Contrasting with the dog’s surliness, Jim is a very pleasant guy, though maybe just a little too quick to mention that the dog is his wife’s idea, and she’s the only being with whom it has good relations.
It turns out that neither of us gets Halloween. We know the routine—bowls of candy for trick-or-treaters, maybe some decorations, and parties. (We learned both of us eschew the latter two to the extent allowed by our significant others. When you don’t get it, you don’t get it.) Neither of us is entirely sure how long it’s been since we attended a Halloween party. We can produce what seems a reasonably good description of the attractions some have for the holiday, and we’re both just slightly non-plussed by how ‘into it’ some people are; this points us back to the question: What are we celebrating? Jim shrugs, and says, “I guess it’s just fun for people to dress up in weird outfits and act stupid, and for the kids, it’s also about the candy. I just hope there’s a game on I can watch while manning the door.”
I put the question to others as well: What do we celebrate when we celebrate Halloween? “Dress silly and act stupid,” said one. “Get the scary stuff out of our systems and eat s*** that’s bad for you,” another. “Imagination and the thrills of jump-scares and overcoming them,” declared a bona fide mental health professional who, as such, is probably as close to the truth as anyone.
The mention of Halloween as a church holiday, or related to one, seldom occurred, and when it did come happen, it was always in the context of the history of the thing, never about what people do. I wondered if maybe some, perhaps unconsciously, looked at the vestiges of a religious license as a still-good stamp of approval. A Catholic friend said yes—that, for Catholics, anyway, and probably for some others, the dim and distant connecting thread might have some importance. Likely not much, but some.
From there, I returned to thinking about a holiday that features pranks and scares and scary pranks. Why so much scary stuff? Why the witches, warlocks, vampires, devils, zombies, etc.? It was the zombies that held the key for my next hypothesis. Though getting keys from a zombie isn’t a piece of cake. But thinking about why so many movies, television shows, graphic novels, video games—and yes, now, Halloween—of recent years feature zombies and the like leads us to a pretty sound idea. (Side note: we are NOT going to get into the taxonomy of zombies and zombie-like creatures. Their means of reproduction is, well, let’s call it unconventional. And although often the writers and producers will lay it all at the foot of some wildly, demonically mutated virus, it’s pretty clear the rules and lessons of biology don’t apply.)
Fear is an extremely powerful emotion. We are both hard-wired and conditioned to respond to fear via a combination of reflex, instinct, and avoidance. Fear of loss, pain, injury, and death plays a huge role in our lives. We do innumerable things to separate ourselves from things we fear, and even just from fear itself, and its neighbor, unpleasantness. Why ‘unpleasantness’? Well, if you don’t like that, how about ‘distasteful’? Consider as a metaphor the taste of bitterness. The human ability to taste bitter compounds, strongly evolutionarily conserved, helps protect us from ingesting toxic plant compounds and possibly dying as a result. Things we experience as unpleasant are catalogued by our brains as potentially a risk to our well-being; the ability to discern when unpleasant experiences are acceptable risks, so to speak, is a key survival advantage coming with the development of cognition and bigger brains.
Much has been said and written about fear, our responses to it, the importance of “not letting it run our lives”, and more. The horror movie, or even more broadly speaking perhaps, the scary movie, is a cinematic staple—especially this time of year, of course, when just about every streaming service offers some sort of horror-flick series, and new horror movies invade the local cineplex. Halloween, an inexpensively produced independent movie premiering October 24, 1978, at the downtown Kansas City AMC Empire Theater, became recognized as a classic, ensconced in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006 as ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.’ The next year, a remake, directed by none other than Rob Zombie, was released. We like our horror movies.
It’s not just horror movies. We also like haunted houses, especially the commercial variety that erupt every October, each trying to out-do the next in numbers and depths of scares. Stephen King is still kicking, and still extending a very long and lucrative career writing horror novels—a genre of literature that’s been going strong at least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appeared in 1818. Before that, there were the common grimly dark fairy tales’ such as the tales of Hansel and Gretel, a Pinocchio so dark that the publishers made the author do a re-write, and an original Little Red Riding Hood that is genuinely ghastly.
We like to be frightened—and then recover from that fright. The second half of that statement is vital. Being exposed to a fright, or a fear, and then seeing or having that fear erased, beaten back, or overcome, can be therapeutic. Indeed, in small ways, it’s the sort of thing that psychotherapists and counselors have been doing for a long time. Scared of heights, spiders, or crowds? Repeated small-scale exposures, gradually increasing in size, duration, and intensity, within a range expected to produce a bit of fear, but not so much as to be overwhelming, and then experience what might be called ‘victory’ over that fear, can be a positive therapeutic enterprise.
Maybe when it comes to Halloween we’re all enjoying the opportunity to, in the safety of social groups, experience fear and overcome it—and not just experience it, but walk up to it, command it, and show that we are in control. Just as the tentacles of fear stretch deep into our psyches, the dopamine rush of control over an adrenaline-stimulating scare is a powerful experience, even in small doses. Maybe this is what we are, in effect, celebrating.
Immanuel Kant discussed what he called ‘sublime’ experiences and their importance to us. Experiencing an ‘agitation of the mind’, even or especially a powerful one, and having one’s mind grasp and examine the experience and then fashion and control our responses to it, is one of the ways in which we experience sublimity, a sensation of enlarged power and seeing, perhaps even understanding. Even small experiences of the sublime are powerful, as anyone who has been enthralled with the flight of a crane (or a bumblebee), or received an emotional knock upon discovering a small dead bird, or a child’s lost or discarded toy, can attest to. Sometimes it’s the smallest things, which is good, because sometimes we can only handle the smallest things. And by handling those small things, we prepare ourselves for larger things.
So it is for us with Halloween, or at least some of us. Dressing up, decorating, and/or behaving in ways to appropriate, mock, or deceive things we fear—death, loss, pain, loneliness—and by allowing ourselves to experience the facing of fears, the agitation of our minds, and then the grasping and controlling of both the fear and our responses, is an empowering experience. Given the nature of the modern world, it shouldn’t perhaps have caused me so much wonder that we so celebrate Halloween.
Go get ‘em, kid.
Nota bene: You probably noticed that there was a time gap between posts here. Life had its own priorities and demands, and I shifted focus for a bit. Then had to do it again. But I’m back, just in time for candy corn, jack-o’-lanterns, and cute kids in costume. More soon.
I liked all you wrote until you said “people love to be scared”. Possibly so but I cannot understand it at all - to me Halloween is basically silliness.
Halloween is not so much celebrated...as endured.
Just to clarify something about Catholicity: The day after Halloween is All Saints Day. It's a Holy Day of Obligation, meaning that we're supposed to go to church that day. And some of us actually do.
But the day after that is All Souls Day, otherwise known as the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. This is the one for all us poor schlubs who aren't Saints. We get to hang out in Purgatory until we can get in.
As usual, good writing. You missed your calling.