What Do People Celebrate On Halloween ?
The Celts used the day to mark the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, and also believed that this transition between the seasons was a bridge to the world of the dead.
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When I was a kid it seemed like there were ghosts and ghouls and devils everywhere, at least on Halloween. A lot of the kids had otherworldly costumes that referenced the supernatural. Even a few angels with the devils. I remember as a kid working a ouija board with my friends trying to communicate with a ghost. We did the "Mary Worth" game where you dared someone to stand in front of a mirror and say three times "I believe in Mary Worth", the hoped for (or maybe not so hoped for) result being that Mary Worth would appear in your mirror. Mary Worth was the ghost of a teenage girl (at least in our version) who had been abducted and murdered.
I guess because religion was more a part of many people's lives in those days, more thought was given to an afterlife and how that afterlife would include ghosts. There was Casper, the Friendly Ghost, a cartoon character from the 60's. It's hard to imagine a ghost becoming a popular children's character in today's world, unless the ghost was also a super-hero. There was also a popular tv show called Topper, which was slightly before my time of memory, in which a husband and wife ghost team came to the aid of an uptight stuffed shirt banker. In today's version, the couple would be mutants born in another galaxy or something.
One might trace a major change in Halloween to, oddly enough, Halloween - the 1978 movie. The film represents a very significant shift in Halloween as a day for reflection about the supernatural into a day which celebrated gore , slashers, and serial killers, which as disturbing as they may be, don't philosophically contemplate death or the separation of the living and dead, but rather celebrate evil manifested as mental illness and vice versa. Halloween has never been the same.
Today, one major focus of pop culture is on super-heroes and comic book heroes. On an ESPN show this morning, all of the hosts and even the camera crew were dressed as Marvel super heroes. For Halloween. For every kid that trick or treats as a ghost or devil tomorrow, there will probably be 50 whose costume will be that of a super-hero.
Adult costumes mainly seem to focus on satirizing people or themes in the news recently. A lot of fun, but very little relation to the origin of the celebration of Halloween.
I will have to bring out my dog earred copy of Colin Wilson's 'The Occult', an early 70's history of the supernatural since the dawn of man, and read a chapter about 'apparitions' to get in the old mood. Maybe even queue up 'The Exorcist'.
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Belief in the paranormal I think comes down to belief in God, or more specifically, belief in a supernatural realm. It is also in the category of what cannot be proven or disproven.
More in the spiritual world than in the supernatural for my culture John.
I've always found it funny that people believe in ghosts. How many trillions of people have died throughout history? For every person living today there should be thousands of ghosts to encounter in one way or another, but only certain people have chance encounters, and they don't show up on film and with nobody credible there to vouch for it. This planet should be crawling with them.
As a kid, knowing what I celebrated on Halloween was easy. It was about running through hometown streets after dark with friends in costumes, and candy. It was a blast, and I looked forward to it every year with much anticipation. Any talk of the supernatural or scary stuff was completely for play; no one back then was worried about apples with razor blades, or drugs in candy, or pychos trolling for children. My how things have changed.
I think the author here makes a valid point about slasher movies. It is fairly easy to recognize how the horror genre used to explore childhood traumas, and how those traumas affects a person into their adulthood. A good horror flick can bring you out of yourself, and give a person the means to think about things that actually might be pretty scarey to start contemplating. Any kid who has been through true horror and abuse is much more scared of that than any monster Hollywood can throw at them. But the newer genre of flicks that are just about sick fucks dicing people up, and gore, have nothing of value to add to a conversation concerning trauma and abuse...it instead glorifies it. That seems to me a significant, and deservedly severe indictment of our society and culture.
Halloween has changed over the years, and does not relate to it's original meaning. I guess the culture itself decides whether that is good or bad.
Now we obsess about superheroes. In the old days the superhero was John Wayne or Gary Cooper, or later Clint Eastwood. Now the heroes are only partially human beings. There is a deep meaning to this, for sure, I really believe that , but I don't have the background in psychology to put it into words.
The further we get away from the natural world we are supposed to be intimate with as an everyday reality, the more we long for the sacredness that used to accompany that. There was a time when humans experienced what we modern humans would call the miraculous, as plainly and simply as we now tie our shoes. We are attempting to gain some control over a world and reality that has gone starkly mad. It will not happen until we stop trying to twist nature into a reality we desire, and learn to instead exist perfectly with all of nature as it is in reality. Superheroes are our way of trying to imagine our way into overcoming the madness that present modern society has brought us to. We have lost hope that humans on their own can do that, and we no longer believe in god(s); so, we instead try to make ourselves into gods. Think about it...are our superheroes really all that different from the multiple gods that humans used to worship? No, they are almost exactly the same. Gods, with varying abilities and strengths, but also with very human desires and flaws.
The ancient gods also had human desires and flaws , I suppose that is why they were not considered to be THE God.
You are probably on to something though.
I really like Halloween as a festival! No one died on Halloween in my family, which is a miracle, and you get to dress up and be someone else for a night. Plus, the candy! Plus, the lit pumpkins! Oh what fun!
My husband's family, naturally, took this carefree holiday and messed it up with "Cemetery Sunday". That means you had to go to the cemetery and recite rosaries for the people buried there. Nice idea-- but I'm a Methodist and don't know the words, nor how to do it properly, and no one really wants me, a Methodist, in their ritual. I don't need a day to visit the cemetery and remember my family-- I remember them every single day, and miss them, all day, everyday.
They didn't decorate anyone, they just stood there, through the ritual, murmuring prayers. Which is nice. So I prayed, too-- not for their souls, because I believe they were sucked up into heaven immediately, but in thanks for them being in my husband's family. Then we all went out to eat-- all 50+ of us. (Large family. Unlike mine-- when we had a "reunion", we could all sit at one booth in MacDonald's.)
I love Halloween, because it makes death more handle-able, somehow. I like the Mexican custom of inviting the dead souls to eat with you. Although I've never done it, it seems to be a really nice idea. Maybe that's why I like it so much-- it isn't such a Ritual.
Dear Friend Dowser: Tis year I dressed up as someone I a higher tax bracket.
Last year as someone who resides in another zip code.
Next year I will go for being costumed as someone who doesn't let the first one do the talking when two Vowels go walking.
Where do I come up with these things?
E.
Why I am going to celebrate Halloween this year?
It's Saturday and I don't have to work!!!!!