The below is an old essay I wrote in 2016 or 2017, recently rediscovered and slightly edited. It is an early draft of The 7 Desires of Halloween before I decided to break it up into a series of essays. From the length and variety of topics, you can see why. However, it has some wonderful turns of phrases I am loath to assign to the dustbin. It also makes some points from the 7 Desires of Halloween in a different way. Thus, I am reproducing it here for the patient and interested. If you are not a superfan of my Halloween essays, feel free to skip this one.
What Halloween Means to Me
Introduction
It was Friday, October 30th, 2015, and I walked into my day-job (that eternal cross) cheery for once. I had scored a paying gig in the evenings playing the Lord of Purgatory in the New York Haunted Hayride, and was actually enjoying my life more than I had in a very long time. (Other actors shall be familiar with that insidious malaise between jobs).
“Happy Halloween!” I chirped at the fellow admin covering the early shift. “Doing anything fun with the kids this weekend?”
“We don't celebrate Halloween” she intoned with all the dry aghast of an Oxford don asked to watch reality television. “We are Christians.”
Ah, I thought, one of those. As a Christian myself, I found this highly offensive to both my good mood and a basic understanding of the liturgical calendar. For a Catholic such as myself, Halloween is technically the Vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints (which I am fairly certain most reasonably curious people know. All Hallows Eve...You've read the Wikipedia article....moving on). In most liturgical calendars the next holy day begins with the setting of the sun, rather than the quantum ticking of an atomic clock. (In the Catholic church, we round this to 4 pm, but that isn't the point.) So saying that Christian shouldn't celebrate Halloween is patently absurd. Right?
Technically yes, but I am actually more sympathetic to my colleagues point of view than I was a year ago. Witnessing New York City being (which is already a perpetual Bacchanalia) impossibly turned up a notch on Halloween forces me to admit that there are aspects of Halloween which are certainly inadvisable if not impermissible for a Christian to partake in. Anything attempting to summon spirits, from Ouija boards to seances is certainly perilous to anyone who wishes to remain unpossessed, but I think these are mostly the indiscretions of youth. The modesty of dress is important at all times for men and women, but the irrational double-standard and unfairly higher expectations for the modesty of women in our culture requires that I leave this discussion for a separate article less I give way to sexism through oversimplification. (Myself, I have considered soliciting on subways by threatening to strip unless paid not to. I believe this would be a very lucrative secondary income stream, based on the pale, hairy egg shape my body has taken on over a decade of boredom inspired gluttony).
I would also be remiss unless I mentioned the importance of this holiday to my neopagan friends I know little about Samhain, but it, along with other cultures' harvest festivals, have supposedly contributed to many of our Halloween traditions. However, I believe that extreme perspective that all Christian holidays are just thinly disguised pagan festivals to be ahistorical. Many modern pagan traditions can be traced definitively no further back than the 1800s, and so we have a strange confusion where pagans borrow from Christians the traditions which may or may not have been borrowed from pagans. That being said, cultures absorb, assimilate, and osmose constantly, so we can say that we owe our pagan friends gratitude for at least some of our traditions. However, I would not advocate the celebration of Samhain, even were all the externals identical.
This article is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather descriptive of what the holiday means to me. (I am not aiming to define this Holiday historically but personally). The Holiday speaks to me in a way which cannot be attributed entirely to childhood nostalgia. During Halloween, at least those moments not tainted by a lustful gaze or accidental demonic summoning, I feel some great transcendental stirring. I can only describe it as a hybrid sensation somewhere between the first time I saw The Fellowship of the Ring and the moments before I hit my light-cue on stage. I refuse to believe this is some elaborate temptation of the Enemy. The devil can, of course, create a great deal of mischief by altering something that is good just slightly. As the Archangel Michael says (via the pen of CS Lewis in Out of the Silent Planet) “..a bent [human] can do more evil than a broken human”. However, I believe there is something holy at the core of this holiday, and I intend to expound upon this.
Vigil
Halloween is first of all a vigil, and like all vigils, it is about maintaining light in the darkness. We get some dim glimpse of this in the catharsis of horror movies. Though I would not recommend most modern horror as edifying, the fact remains that we derive great pleasure out of facing fear and surviving. The thing we fear may not exist in reality, but our lizard brains can't recognize that, or no fear would exist. We know we need to face what most frightens us and laugh at it. The same principle holds for costumes. Every year children (and adults including myself) take creatures of terror and turn them into caricatures. The (admittedly sympathetic) murderer Frankenstein's monster becomes a dull-witted giant. The cow-cursing witch becomes a friendly green-skinned strega. The damned soul Jack of the Lantern becomes a smiling face. We also take what is ordinary, and make it horrifying. The human face becomes a skull stripped of life and flesh. The cheerful clown becomes and insane serial killer of disordered feature. The boy next door becomes a flesh rending wolfhound. This, I would argue, is also a way of taking back our power from our fears. We mock the supernatural because it wants our soul, and we must show that it cannot have it We enhance the horror of the natural because one day all of us will die, and we must practice this meeting.
I present the following anecdote: When I was playing a monster in the Haunted Hayride, people would frequently try to frighten me as a way of taking back their power. (It almost never worked I was the immortal night, and the night does not startle.)
Where however, does this confidence come from? It comes, I believe, from a knowledge and affirmation of our own immortality, which is a second significance of Halloween. All of us, virtuous or sunk in vice, are immortal. One day we shall either live in eternal bliss of eternal torment. In the creatures of Halloween, we see this immortality, and this choice affirmed. What are vampires but an earthly imagining of our heavenly bodies? What are skeletons engaging in the dance of death but an acknowledgment that the dance goes on. We can also see in all these creatures, twisted as they are, the fate of the damned soul. That we have these monsters as a warning is also a source of joy.
Halloween and Christmas
I always think of The Nightmare Before Christmas, first and foremost of a Halloween Movie. However, I don't find its blending with Christmas to be too garish because of Halloween's (in my admittedly unorthodox view) relationship to Christmas. Halloween makes light of the spiritual battle through cathartic metaphor. Christmas brings light to that same battle through the revelation of a real and present hope of victory. Halloween snubs its nose at the enemy. Christmas sets up the final, victorious blow. Because of Christmas “The monsters all are missing. /The nightmares can't be found./...The empty space inside of [us] is filling up.” Because of Christmas (and Easter), the war is already won. Our job is merely to avoid treason during the mop-up battles. Our job is to remember who we are in the dark of Halloween. We are no more creatures of darkness than a soldier covered in the mud of the trenches is a swamp thing.
A star is shining, and the darkness is retreating. Forward, people of Halloween—forward towards Christmas.
