Halloween... Good!

For many horror fans, Halloween is the best time of the year. Christmas still squeezes it out for a few softies like me, but even then Halloween comes in a close second. I mean, what with all the horror movies and comics being released at that time, all the spooky decorations in stores and on houses, all the monster movie marathons on cable, and the costume parties that provide handy excuses for getting good and gored up as your favorite creep. And there’s candy…

It’s sad then that Halloween is under attack. Between well-meaning Christians claiming that it’s a despicable, satanic holiday, and the persistent rumors of real-life monsters putting everything from cyanide to razor blades in the candy, it’s no wonder that house-to-house trick-or-treating, the essence of Halloween as far as kids are concerned, seems to be dying out. Now people are taking their kids trick-or-treating at malls and grocery stores, if at all.

Not that there’s anything wrong with trick-or-treating at malls and grocery stores. My wife Diane and I take our son to the local supermarket every year, but it’s always a couple of days before Halloween and in addition to normal trick-or-treating, not in place of it. If it were on Halloween Night, I wouldn’t do it. I feel strongly about this and for a much better reason than just wanting to pass some nostalgia along to my boy (though that’s part of it).

To explain why Halloween is important, I need to go back and talk about where it came from for a bit. Doing that will accomplish a couple of things. First, it’ll show that the holiday isn’t satanic in origin as some claim. But more vital than that, it’ll also reveal where some of the traditions come from that make Halloween great.

As with most good holidays, Halloween got started with the pagans. In this case, Celtic ones. Real knowledge about ancient Celtic religious practices is sketchy, but from what we can tell there were four, big holy days for the Celts: Samhain, Oimelc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. They each occurred about the time that the seasons changed, with Samhain and Beltane being the most important. Samhaine marked the transition between Fall and Winter, while Beltane commemorated the switch from Spring to Summer. The Celts thought of Winter/Spring as the Dark Half of the year and Summer/Fall as the Light Half, so the beginning of each half was especially important. And most important of all was Samhain (pronounced sow-en; rhymes with cow-en), which not only ushered in the Dark Half, but the entire New Year.

So, this was a powerful time for the Celts, and because the world was in such transition at that time, between years and seasons, a couple of things happened. First, the Celts had a big party. For most of the year, Celtic society, like most primitive societies, was very organized and regimented, with everyone knowing his or her place. So, once a year, the people would cut loose and let chaos reign for a few days. There’s evidence that the Samhain festival lasted for three days from about October 31st to November 2nd. Picture a rustic version of the Festival of Fools from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and you’re probably not far off. Guys dressed in women’s clothing, women dressed like guys, horses getting moved to different fields, and gates getting detached from their hinges and left in ditches. Stupid stuff, but enough to let people blow off some steam from the rest of the year.

The other important thing that happed at Samhain had to do with the Celts’ learned class, the Druids. Again, because the world was considered to be in such an in-between state, the Druids believed that the laws of nature were relaxed and that the boundaries between the living and the dead were weakened. So it was a great time to contact and talk to the spirits of the dead and to try to foresee what was going to happen in the coming year. Keep in mind that this wasn’t nearly as spooky for them as it is for modern folk. The Celts saw death almost daily. If they didn’t see it thanks to the higher mortality rate amongst humans, they certainly did from the slaughter of animals for food and clothing. So, it was only natural that they’d want to chat with the dearly departed and find out things that were hidden to people still in the realm of the living. And Samhain was when they did it.

By 43 A.D., the Romans showed up and conquered the Celtic lands. Several hundred years later, mandatory Christianity was introduced to all Roman territories. When that happened, Christian missionaries arrived with a strategy handed down from Pope Gregory I in 601 A.D. about converting pagans. The Church had experienced difficulty in getting “converts” to quit celebrating their old, pagan holidays, so missionaries were told to simply let the “former” pagans keep celebrating their old festivals, only they had to be Christianized versions of them. That’s why the birth of Christ is celebrated so close to the shortest day of the year, but that’s another story.

The Church had already replaced one pagan Festival of the Dead with a Christianized holiday. It took place in the spring and was called All Saints’ Day. The Church figured that as long as people were thinking about their dead, they might as well turn those thoughts to all the deceased Catholic saints. Presumably, the spring All Saints’ Day had already done its work in co-opting the pagans it was designed to, so in 835 A.D., Pope Gregory IV moved it to Samhain to let it work its magic on the Celts.

The mass said on All Saints’ Day was called Allhallowmas (“the mass of all the holy people”) and the night before was All Hallows E’en (“the evening of all the holy people”). And as usually happened when the Church Christianized pagan holidays, the way people celebrated stayed the same. That means that Hallows E’en was still a time for getting nuts, dressing up, playing pranks, and trying to contact the dead and tell the future.

Some of that went down okay with the Catholics, but the communing with the dead and telling fortunes didn’t. The Bible doesn’t have anything good to say about either of those activities. It acknowledges that they’re possible, but it also commands believers to stay away from them. So, the Church began to denounce not only these activities, but also those who participated in them. In doing so, however, they stretched the truth and Druids were accused of communing not just with the dead, but also with Satan and his minions. And once the Druids were considered downright evil, it wasn’t a large step to considering their activities to be witchcraft. And with that, a whole host of imagery began to be associated with them, from the ghosts and skeletons of the dead with whom they communed to the demonic black cat familiars they were accused of consorting with. That many Christians today are frightened out of celebrating Halloween is something that they come by honestly. The Catholic Church planned it that way.

Fast forward several hundred years. We’re still in Celtic territory – Ireland – but it’s now 1846 and the potato crop isn’t doing well at all. So poorly, in fact, that a whole lot of Irish people flee their country for the United States. They take with them, of course, their traditions and customs, including the parties, pranks, dressing up, and ghost stories of Halloween. They also bring over the practice of carving up vegetables and making lanterns out of them. Back home they’d used turnips (not the same as what Americans call turnips though), but in the States they find that pumpkins are a lot easier to cut.

And for a while, that’s all Halloween is. For a good, long while actually.

It wasn’t until the ‘30s and the Depression that the pranks started to get out of hand. My wife’s 90-year-old grandfather and the uncle of an elderly woman I know both remember celebrating Halloween the way it had been celebrated by those Irish immigrants, by tipping over outhouses and laying chicken-wire booby traps across old, dirt roads. But as the nation got more desperate just before World War II, the Halloween pranks got more serious and violent. Kids were beating each other up and committing real vandalism, so parents and school boards and town councils invented the practice of going door to door in costume to collect candy as a way to keep their kids out of trouble. The term “trick-or-treat” didn’t appear in print until 1939, and it wasn’t included in Merriam-Webster dictionaries until 1941. If you’re in your thirties or older, chances are your grandparents never went trick-or-treating as kids.

While researching this article, my wife and I interviewed some older people we know in order to learn what Halloween was like for them. My mother-in-law grew up in a small community and remembers the holiday as a social time with lots of parties. My wife’s uncle on her father’s side, however, grew up in a more isolated rural area and remembers “tipping the cans,” as in outhouses. Even though his mischief was relatively tame and this wasn’t exactly a scientific study, it certainly supports the other research that I’ve read about social activities on Halloween being an effective deterrent for juvenile tricks.

I also interviewed a woman who grew up in the ‘40s and though trick-or-treating was well established by then, I learned something very interesting from her. As early as that, within a decade of the invention of trick-or-treating, rumors were already flying about madmen putting razor blades in apples.

No one knows where these rumors started, but from the very start they join the poisoned candy rumors as persistent wet blankets over Halloween festivities. Halloween enthusiasts and Michael Moore will tell you that there’s absolutely no truth at all to these rumors; that the few cases that actually occurred were all circumstances of someone trying to kill off a family member and using the rumors as a scapegoat for the crime. Same way some people did back in 1982 after seven victims died from poisoned Tylenol. But Michael Moore isn’t exactly well-known for his objective presentation of facts and we’d certainly be wise to question claims made by Halloween enthusiasts with an interest in portraying the holiday in a positive light, so a visit to the indispensable Snopes.com is in order.

Turns out that Moore and the others are only partially exaggerating. In the case of poisonings, they’re right on. Every single incident but one turned out to be either a crime targeted at a particular child, an accidental poisoning by means other than Halloween candy, or a death caused by something other than poison that just happened to occur on or shortly after Halloween. The one incident that hasn’t been completely cleared is a case (in 1982, interestingly) in which a bunch of Halloween partygoers got sick after consuming candy and cake. The reason for it was undetermined and might even have been random food poisoning if not a disguised attack on a particular individual. No one knows for sure.

More disturbing is the fact that there have been many cases of razor blades, needles, and other objects found in Halloween treats, but even then there’s reason to relax. Joel Best, a professor of sociology at California State University, Fresno did massive research on the legend and found that 75% of reported incidents involved no injury (i.e. the “victim” found the object before biting into it) and that virtually all of them were hoaxes devised by either “victims” looking for attention or parents hoping to get a sick thrill out of frightening their children. There are two exceptions to this. 1982 (again) was a weird year and people used the Tylenol murders and other urban legends to try to get away with murders of their own. Again though, these incidents were all targeted at specific individuals. The other exception, and the more frightening one, was in 2000 in Minneapolis when a man put needles into Snickers bars and distributed them to trick-or-treaters. One boy was pricked by a needle, but no one required medical attention.

So, despite the horrifying rumors, it looks like no one in the history of trick-or-treating has ever been killed or even seriously injured by a lunatic either poisoning or inserting objects into treats and distributing them randomly to kids. And while it’s tempting to blame our paranoia about it on the “culture of fear” described in Barry Glassner’s book of the same name, the legends and paranoia have been around for as long as kids have been trick-or-treating. This is nothing new. Parents have a right to be – and should be – cautious about what their kids collect and eat at Halloween, but yanking their children off the streets in fear isn’t the answer. Indeed, it’s contributing to the problem.

As Americans become more isolated and fearful of one another in general, we need opportunities to dispel those fears. Unfortunately, we have precious few left to us. We don’t know our neighbors anymore and it’s our own fault. The National Night Out program is a step in the right direction and neighborhoods that participate in it have experienced positive results from people getting out and meeting each other. We’ve done it in my neighborhood for the last couple of years and it’s very cool. Except for one problem.

Diane goes all out planning for National Night Out. She does face-painting, one of our neighbors grills burgers and hot dogs, another neighbor brings out a ping pong table; it's a party in our cul de sac. The only snag is the neighborhood kids whose only responsibility is to show up, get painted, and then eat. Once that's done, they're left to their own devices and rowdiness and trouble ensue. And it strikes me that the reason that happens is that they have no job for the evening. They're asked to contribute nothing.

We didn’t use to need a National Night Out. We had Halloween. And the best part of the deal was that it was reciprocal. The kids took the time to choose and put on costumes for the entertainment of the treat-givers. And even if neighbors weren’t sitting down and truly getting to know each other, at least they were seeing each other and interacting. For that one night, they were coming out from their doors – out from their isolation – and amusing each other.

That’s why Halloween isn't just okay; it's important. Yeah, it’s a cool holiday if you like being scared, but the best part of being scared is confronting your fears and making it through the experience. And you know that none of us are afraid of vampires and werewolves anymore. We’re afraid of each other.

Thanks to ratings-hungry news outlets and vote-hungry politicians, we live in a world where the scariest monsters are other people. We’re scared of everyone from the kids in our schools to the people in the cars next to us during rush hour. We’ve been taught, incorrectly, that anyone can snap at any time and end us right then. We need a night where we can get out amongst each other and face this irrational fear we’ve developed of our fellow humans. Because it is irrational.

And when we pull our kids off the streets and only let them get their Halloween candy in malls or at church or any other place that we think we can control and feel comfy about, we only feed and perpetuate the fear. And it makes the world a worse place.

We need Halloween.