I got an email from one of my favorite snowbirds the other day that really surprised me. He said in it that he thought that Halloween was the last holiday that Unitarian Universalists should celebrate. It is based on the fear of the supernatural and we should, if we are not, mostly be about telling people not to base their lives on unfounded fears. He also complained about its increasing commercialism and celebration of greed. He signed his note "The Grouch", which he really isn't at all, but he knew that his would not be a popular position, Halloween is almost as popular with children as Christmas - and maybe with adults, too.
He may have a good point about its increasing commercialism. Except for the plutocrats among us people used to make their own costumes, or more likely their mothers did. I have an old picture of myself in a luna moth costume along with my older sister as a fairy and my younger brother as a grasshopper that my mother made out of crepe paper and wire that were absolutely wonderful! My own best effort was a very authentic looking cookie monster that I made for my eldest son. Later he took over the job and made the most incredible Darth Vader costume, including the mask, for his father, a Jawa for his younger brother and an Animal costume for himself. For those of you who missed them, that last is one of the more complex of the Muppets. Nowadays every store is filled with costumes in a whole range of prices. I remember making orange and black crepe paper streamers and cobwebs out of string. We did get commercial cutouts of witches and bats, I think. Nowadays the store shelves are filled with fancy decorations. I must admit that if I could justify the expenditure (and had some place to put it) I would get a whole town of those marvelous pottery haunted houses. I absolutely adore them. The banks and banks of Halloween greeting cards do seem a bit over the top I will admit.
I suppose, when we are worrying so much about the increasing obesity of the younger generation, it doesn't make a lot of sense to hand out candy, but I must admit that if I were a kid trick or treating I would a lot rather get a 3 Musketeers or a Mounds bar than a carrot or a celery stalk. In fact, I might even consider such a donation worthy of a trick, though that is something that has pretty much gone by the wayside. In some ways Halloween has been quite thoroughly sanitized. I understand that in my parents generation the trick or treating was done the night before and Halloween was reserved for the tricks that you played on those who sent you empty from their door. Nowadays kids may, if they have the nerve in these days of zero tolerance, occasionally t-p the neighborhood, but it has nothing to do with the generosity or lack thereof of their neighbors.
As you can see, my correspondent was correct in his assumption that I would not entirely agree with him in his negative attitude toward Halloween. Though I believe in the supernatural no more than he does, and though I also deplore the greed and materialism of our society, I think Halloween addresses some important aspects of the human personality, allowing us to objectify our fears and learn how to face them. It's interesting that the other people who are most opposed to the celebration of Halloween are those who believe deeply in the supernatural and in the power of the father of evil in our lives. They quote the line in the Bible about not suffering a witch to live and see Halloween as the celebration of evil spirits.
Perhaps it is in part my affection for ancient traditions that makes me a partisan of Halloween. It has existed since long before Christianity came to northwestern Europe as the midseason festival between the equinox and solstice and was the beginning of the year. It was called Samhain and was thought to be the night when all the evil spirits were free to walk the earth. Walking also were the spirits of those who had died in the previous year. People costumed as frighteningly as they could to scare them away. It has occurred to me that it was, as all pagan festivals were, a nature festival. Just as spring festivals celebrated the renewal of life after the cold and death of winter, Samhain was instituted to try to ward off the fears of the coming winter, which in those days were very real and very well-grounded. Cold, want and disease took huge tolls and the elderly and the infants, those most vulnerable, were very likely not to make it through to the relieving springtime.
It makes sense, then, that there would be a ritual observance confronting the deepest fear of the human animal. Though rationally we may understand that death is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing, though for those who lose someone beloved that may be hard to accept, though we may comfort ourselves with ideas of an afterlife or at least escaping the suffering in our lives, even unacknowledged, the fear is with us. It is instinctive - below our rational, thinking, critical brain. Personal survival and the survival of our gene pool and our species is a drive that we share with all the other animals. For us, however, it is worse, because we are aware of our own mortality, the inevitable ending of our days and of those whom we love. Halloween allows us to project that pre-rational fear and all the ones that are inevitable consequences of it outward, allowing us somehow to deal with it better.
Halloween has been undergoing a sanitizing process for some time, which may be part of the reason for the popularity of horror movies and such things, since we need to deal with our fears somehow. The costumes are no longer necessarily scary - I hear that most of them this year will be pirates, which, though they can be pretty scary are more likely to be seen as romantic, and certainly as not in the least supernatural. It is also far less lawless than it used to be. Mischief that used to be the rule is no longer winked at or excused as being an inevitable part of the season. I am hardly one to talk, myself, about that. I always insisted that my costumes be either pretty or romantic - even my witch costumes had to be based more on Glinda the Good than on the wicked Mombi. And I really hate horror movies and books. Though I like science fiction in theory - and often in fact - I don't go to such movies because of my expectation that they will be more horror than science. I get a rather odd series of books called the world's best reading. I keep on getting them every couple of months because once you reject one they think that is an indication that you don't want to get any more of them. This makes for a certain number of duplications, but I need something to donate to the Alliance used book sales. Once a year around Halloween I get a book suitable to the season. This year it was Dracula by Bram Stoker, which I must admit I rather liked. I've never seen one of the movies, though, nor do I intend to. Or read Ann Rice's vampire novels. A while ago it was Frankenstein, last year it was Phantom of the Opera. I haven't seen those movies either, but at least I've read the books. Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier, I couldn't cope with at all. As usual, it was the fourth chapter before I decided that enough was a superabundance. Why, I can still remember the horror I felt at my first movie when I was 4. It was Snow White and as the wicked queen, uglified, poled her scow through the underground caverns, I trembled as I sat. I am just no good at horror. I don't like seeing Draculas bleeding at the mouth or mummies wrapped in bloody bandages, and please don't anyone approach me with a realistic Frankenstein's monster imitation. I will cower and scream. Nevertheless, I can understand these things value in showing us that fear and evil can be faced and they can be overcome.
The supernatural and the unreal - the things in which we don't really believe - I think are better to project our fears on than the more realistic if almost equally unlikely things we tend to be using today. Crime and violence are real, but the likelihood of any of us being attacked is statistically extremely small, and yet we hide behind double-locked doors in our gated communities and refuse to allow our children to walk with others a few blocks to their homes from the school bus. How could we forgive ourselves if anything happened to them, and yet in our protection of them we keep them from learning how to protect themselves? No wonder they love Halloween. In our own fears for ourselves we limit our joys to television and daytime activities unless we are assured of the greatest security, and burden ourselves with alarm systems that we've never heard activated except for a false one. We panic at mere rumors of terrorism and the first mention of a hurricane. No wonder extreme sports are gaining in popularity. Everybody needs an adrenaline rush now and then.
The instinct for survival is the basis for fear, both rational and irrational. A person who has decided to kill himself will jump out of the way of a bus that bears down on him. It is so much a part of our nature that I almost believe that it's in the same part of the brain that controls our breathing and our heartbeat. But there is something else that is a part of our nature, too, and I think is equally a part of our survival as a species, and that is the need to risk danger, to face it and to face it down. The opportunity to take risks is as necessary to us as security. It's not a random accident that an adrenaline rush feels good as well as making us faster and stronger. It's part of our mechanism for survival. Courage is one of the most necessary qualities for living. The ancient Greeks considered it one of the cardinal virtues, and they were right. Just living takes courage - to get out of bed in the morning, to make a difficult decision, to cross a busy street. How will we learn it if we never get to practice?
There is another reason besides my love of ancient tradition and my sense that this kind of objectifying of our most basic fears enables us to live more abundantly that I love Halloween. In some ways those may be more excuses than reasons, justifications that make us feel that playing is good for us. And it is good for us. We learn from it; it rests us; those who know how to play are mentally and physically healthier. All that is true. I think, though, that it has an essential value in itself. It is a good and lovely thing to play in non-hurtful ways, good and lovely in itself without need for justification and rationalization. We are often, I think, so very serious and earnest. We want our kids toys and play to be educational, and our own pleasures seem to need to be justified by how good they are for our physical health or our minds. Our religion only seems to be properly practiced if we can point to some good we are doing in the world. I would like to say that play for the sake of the joy of play itself renews the soul, but that too gives it a purpose that would make us earnestly seek out play for that rather than for itself. I think that play is its own justification and meaning when it gives us joy. It is a connection with what transcends our material being.
So I do most clearly disagree with my correspondent who wanted to remove Halloween from the calendar of our holidays. I hear his complaint, and I agree that it should not become just another time in which we are pushed into celebrations we do not want, labors we do not enjoy and the spending of money we do not wish to spend. I even think that if we did indeed believe in the ghosts and goblins and other apparitions of supernatural origin, and thought, as did our ancestors that we were frightening them away we would be betraying our understanding of reality and truth, but we do not so believe. Instead we can embrace Halloween for its ancient traditions that we do well to preserve and for the fact that it enables to project our fears onto that which can not harm us, and learn from that how to deal with the real dangers in our lives. Most of all, though, we should celebrate it because it is fun - fun in the costumes, fun in the candy, fun in the transcendence of the material world in the joy of the spirit. May we each have a happy and fear-filled Halloween.