Happy Halloween, y'all!
Halloween is one of our more commercialized holidays, with an emphasis on dressing up in funky costumes, going door-to-door asking for treats, watching scary movies, and the occasional practical joke on those that hand out toothbrushes or worse nothing at all (very few people would hand out rocks to the Charlie Browns of the world, thankfully). (It is also very dear to me, personally, because while I was officially born on November 1st, it was at 2:20am, late night on Halloween night. Yep, I'm a Halloween baby!) But is that all there is to Halloween? How did it get started?
Like many of our modern holidays (I'm looking at you, Christmas and Easter!), Halloween has a fairly pagan past, in this case Celtic, and likely stretches back to 1000 BC in western and central Europe, mostly in what is today France and the British Isles. Contrary to the assertions of many Christians, Halloween is not "the devil's holiday". Halloween is descended from the Celtic New Year's Eve, a night when the walls between the material world we see around us and the spirit world of the faerie are at their thinnest, enabling the less savory fae to cross over to our world. Back then, the ancient Celts dressed up in outfits and left out carvings intended to scare the fae back to their world.
That's right. Those costumes we wear and the Jack-O-Lanterns we leave out are actually meant to scare the bad guys! Nothing "satanic" or "evil" in that; quite the opposite, I'd say. It was only the demonization of pagan religions by the early Christians that led to it being labeled as a "satanic" practice.
Still, there's something to be said where the holiday has survived nearly unscathed into the modern era. The early Christians, seeing the hold the holiday held over the populace, tried to Christianize it, like they did Christmas and Easter (the modern symbology of both - particularly the Christmas tree and the Easter Bunny - comes from pagan Germanic practices and myths), and labeled it "All Hallow's Eve" (hence the name "Halloween"), with November 1st becoming "All Hallow's Day" or "All Saints Day", a day dedicated to celebrating every Christian saint.
Halloween is also, like the American Thanksgiving holiday, a harvest festival. That's why the pumpkin gets such symbology in the holiday: it's an easy to carve gourd that ripens about this time of year. Apple cider comes from the fact that apples are ripening this time of year, and the fermentation of last year's crop has come to fruition.
So when you dress as a vampire or witch and go bobbing for apples at a costume party, or settle in to watch Night of the Living Dead or a Walking Dead marathon on Netflix, remember to scare the bad guys that can slip through. Howl along to Ozzy's "Bark At The Moon" and Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" while you're at it.
Embrace your inner pagan. Celebrate Halloween in style, and enjoy yourselves. Just remember where the holiday comes from, and celebrate it, don't deny it.
Viva la Halloween!
