Halloween is one of the last remaining liturgies in contemporary America.
There are a few others—Christmas, of course; a vague gesture at Thanksgiving, especially in household-oriented outlets like Target and Pottery Barn; a week or two of bunnies and eggs around Easter; and Halloween’s archnemesis, Valentine’s Day. If you don’t live in the Midwest or Texas, the 4th of July is more honour’d in the breach than the observance, but you might get one of the themed months that suggest that we can, communally, pick twelve things to be important during any given year (like women’s history or Irish-American heritage).
In Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, author Katherine May attends a festival at Stonehenge. She observes that the modern-day adherents of paganism celebrate a festival every six weeks, and that somehow it feels appropriate to measure time in this way, marking the passage of partial seasons with seasonal events. This isn’t an exclusively pagan practice, though. Medieval Christianity had approximately one festival every month, and the surviving few secular festivals are Christian ones: Christmas, Easter, Halloween.
Halloween is in a way the most interesting of these. The name is, of course, an inheritance from All Hallows’ Eve, the day before “Allhallowmesse”—All Saints’ Day. But Christians are often uncomfortable nowadays with the imagery of Halloween, which takes on more of the pagan overtones of Halloween’s druidic predecessor, Samhain.
Some Halloween imagery is disturbing, and much more of it is in bad taste. But what interests me about Halloween is twofold: it’s the only remaining secular holiday with spiritual overtones, and as compared to the now-iconoclastic secular Christmas and Easter, it maintains medieval levels of enthusiasm for imagery. The medieval mind loved an image—from stained glass windows to gargoyles, from the icons written in the East to the unicorn tapestries woven in the West.
So, as it turns out, does the Midwestern mind. Halloween, along with Christmas, is the occasion for elaborate front yard tableaux, but unlike Christmas’ relatively anodyne inflatable trees and snowmen, the Halloween Midwestern front yard is full of images with symbolic resonance. People place gravestones in their front yards and remind themselves of death; they weave fake spiderwebs with giant spiders to remind themselves of entropy and decay; they set up pumpkin-headed monsters—well, I haven’t gotten to the bottom of the pumpkin phenomenon, but I’m sure of one thing: it somehow feels right to pass that glowing orange pumpkin on the highway on the way to my house, glimmering out the window like a lighthouse in the rain.
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