HALLOWEEN Celebration for the Senses
	OCTOBER 2003

by Chris Scott
Photos by Brad Shifflett

Pumpkin “guts” have a really greasy, slippery quality. Remember how creepy the bottom of the pumpkin felt to your fingers when you were nine years old? You had carefully cut the top off your pumpkin so you could replace it when the Jack O’ Lantern was complete. Then you scraped out all of the insides with the biggest metal spoon you could find. The creepy part would always begin at that point — when you had to reach inside and scrape the stuff off of the bottom and sides of the pumpkin. Then you would cut the eyes, nose, and mouth out to make as evil looking a face as possible.

Of course the pièce de résistance of the experience was the moment you lit the candle, replaced the top, shut off the lights, and stood back to watch the spooky visage leering out at you from the darkness — his horrible countenance only made more terrible by the dim flickering light that shown out through his features. The experience was always a thrilling and comical moment of terror-under-control.

Cleaning a 35 pound pumpkin to make a Jack O’ Lantern provides a representative set of Halloween experiences and associated feelings. The things that make Halloween special seem all to revolve around strong connections between the mind and the senses.

Adults and children alike really buy into the celebration, I think, because vibrant impulses coming to the eyes, ears, fingers, and mouth lead to marvelous experiences of laughter, happiness, innocent vanity, appetite, and (of course) terror. We’re laughing! We’re horrified! We’re delighted! We’re aroused! We’re conceited! Our emotions are soaring! We’re really alive! Halloween permits us just for a few hours to throw off the shackles of convention and wear stuff, do stuff, and say stuff, and of course eat stuff that society frowns upon or even denies to us during the rest of the year.

Not everyone likes Halloween, of course. One grouchy person wrote the unkind words: Halloween is the only day of the year when a teenager is dressed appropriately. It is a holiday where parents spend $55 for a mask their child will wear once to go out and beg for $2.18 worth of candy the child will not be permitted to eat.

Halloween is not just for the kids but appeals to the child inside many of us, I think. C.S. Lewis wrote the unforgettable words, “It is the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.” Watching adults let their hair down is a wonderful experience. It is marvelous to watch children of any age really enjoy themselves. I love to watch people celebrate Halloween. And I’m not alone. Halloween is becoming increasingly popular and currently follows only Christmas as the time when most money is spent on costumes, decorations, and (most of all, of course) candy.

A Mixed-together Holiday
The modern celebration of Halloween is never to be taken seriously; it is rather a time to be childlike. It is a time for the imagination; a time to pretend. Halloween is definitely not a time for reflection and learning. However, the celebration of Halloween has deep and rich traditions, even though they are universally ignored by almost all Halloween celebrants.

Even more than with most elements in our culture, the celebrating on October 31st has been nourished by an extensive network of cultural tributaries all feeding into our American observance of Halloween. Some of these sources stretch back thousands of years into the past and include, among others, Celtic, Roman, and Christian origins.

Pass the Celt
The Celts, for example, observed New Year at the beginning of November. In their minds this was the time of transition between the season ruled by the sun that was fading away, and the coming season ruled by cold and dark. The warm sunny days were gone and the bitterly cold days of winter were coming. (This wasn’t Brentwood, remember.)

However, no use crying about what can’t be changed; might as well have a party. So the last day of their year, October 31, everyone would offer sacrifices of thanks to the vanishing Sun god and light fires, which they would dance around in celebration of the passing season.

In various ways the people incorporated into their celebration representations of the diminishing sun. The hope by some people was that some of the depictions might arouse the curiosity of the Sun god if he caught a glimpse of himself and he might return and warm the land once again. A brilliant thing about the plan was that it always worked! The people held out the images of the sun and six months later the Sun god responded to the lure and returned to satisfy his curiosity. (Always hard to argue against success!) Actually the fires and the dancing had a less-merry purpose than mere celebration and invitation; they were intended to chase away any ghosts or witches that might be in the vicinity. It was long believed that fire and noise would keep away evil spirits since, for example, such things kept wolves away so effectively. (“Logic is logic. That’s all I say” – Oliver Wendell Holmes)

A hearty party
The Celtic celebration on the 31st was just the beginning. On the following day the real festival began and lasted for three days. People loved to dress up in costumes to make themselves look like animals. They called the festival Sakhalin. For some reason you pronounce this sow-in, but the British pronounce it sow-een. (Just pronounce it Sam-hane, if you like since hardly anyone you meet will know anything about this.) Celtic priests (called Druids) would go from door-to-door begging gifts of food to appease the god of the dead, Muck Olla. (Good thing for him that he was a god. If he had been a human being with a name like that can you imagine how many times he would have gotten beaten up in 5th grade? Little Muck Olla wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.)

Also, these same Druids practiced “snapping for apples,” which was certainly the origin of our bobbing for apples. Only they did it as a way of foretelling the future. According to some traditions Lord Samhain, like an evil Santa Claus, would arrive in darkness and fear to find spirits he could take back to the underworld with him. In other places it was thought that during this night the spirits of newly departed people would rise from the dead. So one reason why the Celts dressed in costumes to celebrate Samhain was that along with the fire and dancing they hoped to ward off these malevolent spirits that were abroad on that night. They believed the costumes might confuse the spirits. (I get the impression the Celts didn’t think of evil spirits as being particularly bright.) Some Celts feared black cats and on the Samhain holiday they would sometimes burn the poor creatures to death in wooden cages because they thought black cats associated with witches or, perhaps, even were witches themselves.

Mixing in the Goddess of Nuts and Christian influences
The Celts were defeated by the Romans and Samhain traditions were eventually stirred together with Pomona Day, which the Romans also celebrated the first of November. The Roman Goddess Pomona was variously known as the goddess of gardens, harvest, and apples. In some places she was also the

Goddess of Fruit and Nuts.(People today might call her “Queen Granola.” Mean people from back East would probably call her “The Patron Saint of California.”)

Christianity soon came on the scene with a third celebration at the beginning of November. November 1 was called Hallowmas, or All Saint’s Day, and was used to honor departed Saints. The preceding day, October 31, became All Hallow’s Eve and eventually Halloween.

Primitive Christianity actually even supplied a fourth holiday when it later began celebrating November 2 as All Souls Day to honor the rest of the dead. The people showed their honor of the dead by parading around bonfires dressed as devils, saints, angels, and Chewbacca. (Wait! That last disguise actually came later.) Some ancient people believed that on All Souls Day the ghosts of the departed would visit the homes of the living and ask for food. Sometimes children went door to door gathering food which would be offered to the dead and then actually given to the poor. Even today people in some Catholic countries celebrate All Souls Day by parading as skeletons, spirits, and ghosts and putting food on the graves of departed loved ones.

A tradition among those long-ago primitive Christians was to hunt down and burn black cats, just like the Celts had done centuries before them. (I’m a cat lover and I resent that people could have been that mean. Everyone says that society is getting worse but at least you go to jail these days for some behaviors that in the past were encouraged by religious leaders.)

The church leaders in ancient Europe, of course, were hoping that from October 31 to November 2 everyone was celebrating the two Holy Days of the church but, in fact, the “unwashed mass” of people were stirring Samhain, Pomona Day, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day together in a frenetic, raucous, and probably sometimes joyful stew. In the same way our Halloween traditions mix together elements from these ancient celebrations — trick-or-treating, apples, nuts, harvest, black cats, magic, evil spirits, death stories, ghosts, skeletons, and skulls. We stir Celtic, Roman, and Christian elements into our own undifferentiated stew of Halloween celebrations.

Of course none of us who are occupying the relatively small but safe area between the lunatic fringes of our society would consider investing our Halloween traditions with any of these forgotten backgrounds. Ask somebody why they put on a costume decorated with black cats or why they bob for apples and they will typically give you a blank stare. They don’t know why — except it’s fun. They don’t feel the need for any other reason than that.

What about that Jack O’ Lantern?
There are many versions of the legend behind the Jack O’ Lantern. Here is a good ’un: A stingy drunkard named Jack tricked the Devil into climbing an apple tree and then cut the sign of the cross into the trunk so the Devil couldn’t get down.In exchange for freeing the Devil, Jack made him promise never to take his soul to hell. However, after Jack died God wouldn’t let him into heaven either. According to the story the Devil was apparently kinder to Jack than God was because the Devil at least gave Jack a coal from hell to light his way through the outer darkness. Since that time Jack has been wandering around carrying the burning coal inside a turnip that he put holes in so the light could get out.

In imitation of poor Jack, people in Ireland would carve out turnips, potatoes, or rutabagas, put candles inside, and then hang them outside their homes as a defense against evil spirits. I find it really hilarious, for some reason, that some of these people carved out rutabagas. I don’t even know what a rutabaga looks like (like a turnip, I think) but I love its Dr. Seuss-comical name and am amused at the idea of putting a candle inside one. Only when they got to America did the descendants of these people begin to use pumpkins, which was a good idea, I think. Can we imagine trying to put a candle inside a potato?

Trick or treat with a vengeance
The tradition of trick or treat apparently began with armed juvenile delinquents who went from house to house threatening to beat each owner with clubs and sticks if he didn’t give them things to eat.

When my parents were young the descendants of these wicked young people would push over outhouses on Halloween without even giving the poor farmer a chance to give them a treat.

By the time I was a child the trick part had diminished to soaping the windows of stingy homeowners or, if we were feeling particularly mean, smearing their windows with paraffin wax.The world has gotten even more gentle now, of course, and the civilized children of Brentwood only say “trick or treat” as a friendly greeting. They wouldn’t know what “trick” to pull in the absence of a “treat.” Anyway, most of them will never meet anyone who won’t give them a treat of some kind.

Ghost story
When I was 12 years old I went to a Halloween Party at my buddy’s house. At the end of the party my friend’s older sister shut off all of the lights. The house was completely dark except for a single candle Nada held in her hands. She told a great story, which I will only summarize: A group of people who opened a forbidden tomb suffered an evil curse that killed them all off, one of them dying on the stroke of midnight on every Halloween Night. At last a single person was left alive. That final survivor was telling the story just as the last Halloween midnight was approaching. How relieved the man was when midnight finally arrived and he was still alive...Suddenly Nada blew out the candle and screamed. And we all shrieked in terror. The house was filled with our loud cries and screams.

That was the most scared I have ever been in my life! That was the most fun I ever had at a party! We all laughed until the tears ran down our cheeks! It was the quintessentially perfect Halloween experience! We had survived a horrible experience! We were alive!

Life was good!

So don’t hold back this Halloween! Pull out all the stops!

Spread pumpkin “guts” all over the place!
Eat until you’re sick!
Laugh until you cry!
Scare yourself to death!
Happy Halloween!