Halloween tales
As everyone knows, the season of Halloween is upon us. The shops are full of scary (but not really believable) costumes, and if you listen at night you will hear the steady rhythms of firecrackers going off somewhere in your neighbourhood. This afternoon I was talking briefly with a group of elderly ladies, and one of them confided that she finds the period from mid-October to early November wholly scary – and she mean that literally, she is scared every evening. Others in the group nodded assent. It is a time when less secure people in the community can become victims, even if the offenders don’t really mean any harm.
And Halloween popped up for me in another guise today, in this completely weird but true news story. Apparently a man who had shot himself and whose body was lying on a patio somewhere in California was left lying there for days because those who saw him thought he was a Halloween display. I guess this tells us a certain amount about modern society, and the increasingly ghoulish nature of this particular festival.
Halloween (or Hallowe’en, if you want to be pedantic – a contraction of All Hallows’ Even) has both pagan and Christian roots. The pagan roots are in fact Irish, and can be traced back to the festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the summer, and during which the spirits of the dead were said to mix with the living. With the rise of Christianity, this was merged with All Saints Day on November 1st, with the prior evening known as All Hallows’ Even. But the Celtic hints of something spooky survived the Christian annexation of the festival, and this in turn was carried to America with the 19th century Irish emigrants; and so Halloween was given its popular modern status in the United States.
When I was a boy, Halloween was just good fun, with fancy dress (which did not need to be spooky at all) and a bonfire; whereas today it has, at least for some, all taken on a somewhat menacing tone. Gangs of teenagers throwing firecrackers at more vulnerable people is perhaps now one of its most typical manifestations. I think maybe it is time that society asserted itself and stopped the more unpleasant aspects of this time of year.
Or am I just a spoilsport?
Explore posts in the same categories: religion, societyTags: Christian, Hallowe'en, pagan, Samhain
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October 18, 2009 at 7:39 am
Yeah well, if you are going to burn bones of the community all on the one evening then you will have a bit of mixing of the living and the dead. And it was just the bones.
But to my little hound this time of year is a bloody nightmare, which she spends under my bed shivering for she is able to hear the little bast…. letting off those things through the soundproof glass.
October 18, 2009 at 11:54 am
I live alone and dread Hallowe’en. My border collie also suffers badly at this time of year Vincent. However, he has a good memory, so he takes his revenge when the culprits return throughout the school year asking for sponsorship for various dubious causes!
October 18, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Our own beast thankfully ignores fireworks, but a friend’s golden retriever has something close to a nervous breakdown every year. I don’t know how well it works, but our local vet has a poster up for a kind of ‘anti-anxiety’ pill specifically for this season, especially for frightened dogs. Might be worth a try…
October 18, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Thanks Jilly. I’ll certainly check that out with my local vet. If it works, ‘Rufus’ will be eternally grateful!
October 18, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Funnily enough, my dog (Harvey) doesn’t worry about fireworks. But he does think that anyone setting them off is up to no good, and he goes over at a pace to investigate. He is a big dog (German Shepherd), and looks like he means business. The culprits don’t usually hang around.
October 18, 2009 at 12:18 pm
The latest “hilarious” Halloween game involves cellotaping a banger to a car windscreen!! The windscreen shatters, of course; game over.
October 18, 2009 at 2:27 pm
The Halloween holiday I really like is the one you knew when you were a boy. It’s new holiday here in some European countries and we tend to not really like the gore/horror side of this holiday at all. We’re less violent here. So, for me, I prefer to keep this holiday in the Celtic spirit than another one.
October 18, 2009 at 6:22 pm
This is how we do it in Scotland….more fun in the spring too when Belltaine is amongst us and fires are set on the hills (Calton Hill in Edinburgh, for example). In Samhainn there is fire dancing and the burning of a huge wooden effigy on the doorstep of the main cathedral in Edinburgh’s High Street.
Of course fireworks on that side of the water are on Nov 5th where effigies of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher are traditionally burnt, apparently the English use some other poor chap.
October 18, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Well, Iain, as you’ll have experienced by now, in Ireland we burn effigies daily.
October 19, 2009 at 5:23 pm
chuckle