Halloween
When I was young I imagined that Halloween was
for children.
It was costumes and candy and imaginary play.
Halloween was an escape from reality, it was a
chance to take a glance into another world, to pierce the veil of the real and the
true.
We use to go block to block in our costumes,
we called it Trick or Treating, we carried pillow cases slung over our
shoulders, taking candies at nearly every door we knocked on, with every bell
we rang.
We scoffed at the people who only handed out
little bibles, or toothpaste, or home-made fare, thinking they were doing
something good.
We would rather have nothing at all, than have
those things, which quickly found their way into the trash.
I remember the drill of searching through our
candy piles at the end of the night, looking for suspicious things, open
packages.
We understood that some people hated children
and would slip needles, or razor blades into the candies.
I never found anything dangerous, in all of
those years.
Halloween is not all fun and games, though, it
has a deeper meaning, than we were taught as children, a long history
Halloween is was not just about ghosts and
goblins and friendly witches.
In the celebration of Halloween an ages old
conflict is present, between the Christian Church, and the “Old Time Religion,”
the customs of the pagans, paganus,
pagani, the country folk and their
persistent traditions lurking just beneath the surface of the Christian rites.
On the Christian Calendar; Halloween is All
Hallows Eve, a celebration of the honored dead, of all the saints who had
passed before, who had gone to meet the maker.
For the old pagans; whose traditions are
tightly interwoven with the church, Halloween is a celebration of the dead, plain
and simple, of all of the dead, of the saints and sinners who have passed from
this world together.
Halloween is an acknowledgment of the dead
whose spirits live among us still; good and bad, honored or not, and more often
than not Halloween celebrates the dangerous, the macabre, the frightening and
the weird, those qualities and characteristics that every person hides within
themselves, because they are in fear of the world.
I was fourteen the last time I went Trick or
Treating, and really, I was only chaperoning my younger brother, I was not
dressed up, but I took some candy nonetheless.
In that same year I remember the Pastor at my
church lamenting the popularity of the pagan festival. Believing that the
Christian feast should be honored above it instead, or better yet, to the exclusion
of anything else.
There was no fun in that.
In the years that followed, the number of
children who go out in costumes seeking candy has declined by 25%, so the media
outlets say.
Halloween is no longer considered safe or
wholesome. It has yielded to the real dangers of the real world.
For me it is just another day, Halloween, I do
not believe the dead walk with us. I have never seen a ghost, or any evidence
of magic.
There are real horrors in the world, package
bombers and angry middle-aged white guys with guns.
We have a pumpkin colored demagogue for a
president, spreading fear night and day at every turn.
2018.10.31
Given 1st - 2016.10.31
