Spooky Season
Those of us who do any work around death are fond of remarking that we’re living in a death-denying culture. This is certainly true, as anyone (such as myself) who has recently aged into the target market for wrinkle-reducing skincare can attest. There is still a great deal of messaging that suggests to us that being young is the optimal state, that “40 is the new 30,” and on and on it goes - and that’s just the capitalist commercialism. On a deeper level, many of us feel a great discomfort even talking about death, to the point that the noun “death” and the verb “to die” have, in some settings, acquired a patina of quasi-obscenity, which we soften with the more euphemistic “passed away.”
And so every year, I find myself more and more fascinated by Halloween. At this very moment, I have just watched a dad pushing his kids in a stroller jump, startled by the gauze-clad, ghostly skeleton that our neighbours have hung from a tree out front. The same phantom startled me this morning, its almost-humanoid form catching in the corner of my eye as I opened the curtains. Our neighbourhood goes all out for this holiday; cardboard tombstones sprout from front yards, surrounded by skeletal plastic hands presumably clawing their way out of the implied graves beneath. Lights, pumpkins, crows, spiders, and spectral spooks abound. Somewhere on my street, a motion-activated monster laughs eerily whenever anyone walks by. For the month of October, the whole neighbourhood is haunted.
It’s all genuinely very fun. This year, I’m going to get to attend Clay And Paper Theatre’s Night of Dread for the first time, and I cannot wait to experience this community ritual. I’m looking forward to handing out candy on the 31st, and I may even carve a pumpkin for the first time in decades. And I’m not the only one: many people have said to me over the years that Halloween is their favourite holiday. Which begs the question: why? Why, in a culture that has trouble even saying the word “death,” do so many of us love this spooky season so much?
I’ve come to believe that we sincerely need Halloween - that it fills an important cultural, social, and individual human need. Surely this must be why this festival has survived for centuries, changing form, but always retaining its essential function of temporarily bringing the world of the dead into contact with the world of the living. “Temporarily” is the operative word here: at Halloween, the elements of death that we fear are present at our invitation. There is something terrifically trickster-ish about spending a month making the thing we most fear the basis for celebration and play. For children, the glee of disguising oneself (an old practice with deep roots) and, for one night a year, being not only allowed but encouraged to demand candy from all and sundry is obvious. Even many of us adults find the delight of decorating our homes and creating costumes almost irresistible.
The earlier observance lurking just behind the candy-and-pumpkin exuberance of modern Halloween is Samhain, a very old (think 25oo years or so) Celtic festival which celebrates the harvest, the end of summer, and the dead. Many of our Halloween traditions - disguising ourselves, carving vegetables (originally turnips!) into lanterns to frighten away evil spirits, and eating certain foods including apples and sweets - are direct descendants of this ancient festival, which is still observed by some today. Samhain is a time of year when the dead are thought to be close, and Samhain observances sometimes include setting a place for one’s own deceased loved ones at the dinner table. It’s an element of the older festival that can still have great meaning for us today, if we choose to engage with it; an opportunity to celebrate, honour, remember, laugh about, cry for, and otherwise connect with those we love who have died. Like most holidays, the scope of Halloween seems to me to be broad enough to contain these seemingly disparate elements: a more solemn remembrance of our dead, alongside the gleeful trickery, treats, and guising of contemporary Halloween. Death and life in close proximity - as they so often are.
Halloween is a festival in which so many ancient traditions are still alive, some of them having barely even changed form. And that gives this very old festival of the dead a real potency and aliveness - an aliveness that I suspect contributes to it being so many people’s favourite holiday. Whether we articulate it to ourselves or not, we can feel that something very vital surges at the heart of this annual celebration of all that scares us. Whatever you may celebrate at this time of year, I hope that your celebrations do what an honest engagement with death usually does: make you feel more alive.
Do you love Halloween? What are your traditions and rituals around this holiday? I’d love to hear about your favourite spooky season celebrations in the comments below!