Halloween

This evening I had some time to kill while waiting for a bus in Ilkley, so I wandered around Tesco for about twenty minutes picking up a few treats. On my way out, I noticed not one but two home-made posters for ‘Light Parties’ and my curiosity was piqued. What, pray, is a Light Party, or indeed a Children’s Light Party? Probably best not to over-indulge the little darlings, I thought. Then I noticed the dates- 31st October- and the comment on one of the posters, "No Halloween Costumes Please". Over the last ten years or so, there’s been a creeping tendency in Christian circles to pretend that Halloween doesn’t happen- or at least, that if we pretend it isn’t happening, it won’t. The main manifestation of this has become the Light Party, Rainbow Party or whatever, the basic idea being to hold a party for all the children in the church so that they aren’t tempted to forfeit their immortal souls by bobbing for apples. No doubt it seems like a good idea to some if not many, but if ever there was a step designed to make Christians and their families look like paranoid religious extremists, this has to be it.

The Halloweens of my youth were fairly simple affairs- an attempt at bobbing for apples, which I was never co-ordinated enough to do and which on one attempt nearly ended with my drowning in a basin of water, and a jack o’lantern made out of a turnip. Not a pumpkin, I emphasise- a turnip. This was the 1970’s, and furthermore I have a fairly strong recollection of having to eat the contents of the turnip over the next few days. They say that smells are one of the most powerful triggers of memory that there is, and in my case Halloween is gently scorching turnip flesh from a night light inside. Best of all was one Halloween circa 1980, when children’s television on the BBC was replaced by a set of spooky-themed programmes- I can’t remember what, but it was probably things like a ghost story in Jackanory and so on. The recent commercialisation of Halloween is a comparative novelty- I may be wrong, but isn’t it only really in the last five years that we’ve had cards? In the 1990s I used to love the Halloween episodes of Roseanne, which used to really go to town with the fancy dress and people hosting Halloween parties, making their homes into haunted houses with chambers of horrors, but being by that time very much involved in Christian circles I couldn’t share this fascination with anybody.

But our modern Halloween is in its own way a modern take on an ancient festival which has been with us much longer. Scrape away at the modern manifestations and remnants of the ancient festival of Samhain life beneath; bobbing for apples has connections with various methods of scrying or divination, while the Halloween lantern echoes the prehistoric Celtic head-cults and their preoccupation with the severed head. The ghosts and goblins which provide us with the template for children’s costumes are an echo of the spirits of the departed which were believed to return at this stage of the year, a time and no time between one Celtic year and the next. For this is also the time of the equinox, one of the four quarter-marks of the year, and to our forebears a time when, with the harvest gathered, preparations for winter could begin- and beginning is key to Samhain, as anybody with an interest in modern Paganism will tell you. A time for taking stock, yes, but also for looking ahead (hence the divination) and for cutting away dead wood to fuel new growth in the spring.

And yet there’s still something more to it that the Christians forget. There’s a reason why children should dress up as witches and monsters, and be entertained by spooky stories. Because to see Halloween as being about darkness and fear is only to see one side of the coin. In days gone by, people believed that witches were people who had power to harm them, and anybody believed to be a witch was feared- so what better way to defy that fear than to ridicule it? By telling a scary story and then switching the light on, and by dressing up as a witch, a vampire or Frankenstein’s Monster, we can teach children a valuable lesson- that fear and darkness are never quite as powerful as they seem, and one of the best ways to deal with a fear is to make fun of it. That’s more important, and has the power to do more good, than cutting children off from the world and making them sing repetitive variations on how Jesus loves them, while having one’s spiritual fingers in one’s ears and obsessively pretending that the H-word isn’t happening. It’s a shame that in the majority of homes, families will either be enjoying the secular Halloween of traditions severed from their ancient origins, or a manufactured festival of spiritual blinkers, rather than opening themselves up to the spiritual potential of a time of renewal and looking to the future. If nothing else, it’s drawn me back to my books on the subject and clarified my thinking on exactly how irrational my former friends in Christianity can be, but the important thing, as ever, is to remain open to the possibilities and take responsibility for your own spiritual development because it’s the only way to own whatever you find.