A
holiday celebrating a number of different things, including
monsters,
ghosts,
autumn,
harvests, and
fun. Originally, it was
Samhain, a
pagan festival marking the end of summer and remembering the spirits of the
dead. Later, it became a
religious festival when the
Catholic Church designated it as
All Hallow's Eve and
All Saint's Day. After that, it was a
harvest festival, then a celebration of
pranks, and nowadays, primarily a
celebration for
celebrating.
There are many, many different ways to
celebrate Halloween.
Children like to dress up in fanciful
costumes and go
Trick-or-Treating for
candy. Adults like to dress up in
fanciful costumes and go drinking in bars. You can also attend or participate in
haunted houses, watch lots of
horror movies, host
storytelling parties, drop
acid in a
cemetery,
decorate your house and yard to
spook the kiddies, listen to spooky
music, and much, much more.
Here's the cold, hard truth: Halloween is the best and most important holiday of the year! Better than
Christmas,
Easter,
New Year's Day,
Independence Day,
April Fool's Day,
St. Patrick's Day, or even
Arbor Day. Everyone gets sick of all the others, but no right-thinking person ever grows tired of Halloween.
Scary costumes, candy, and spooky episodes of your favorite sitcoms are all one needs to survive.
But nowadays, Halloween has enemies...
Some people want the holiday
banned out of
concern for their children. Some say Halloween should be banned because it keeps kids up on
school nights (Puh-leeze. Let's ban
nightmares, too -- they can keep kids up 'til morning, ya know). Some want the holiday banned because it's gotten too
dangerous (actually, the vast majority of reported incidents of
Halloween candy poisonings are
hoaxes, perpetrated either by the children reporting the incidents or by adults trying to
cover up for other
crimes). Concern for your children's
safety is
commendable, but let's not
ruin the holiday for the rest of us.
And some people want to ban Halloween because they say it's a
Satanic holiday -- a claim that is pretty clearly untrue. While there are people who consider Halloween to be a
religious holiday, the overwhelming majority of them are
Wiccans and other
neo-pagans -- very definitely
not devil-worshippers. As for the
dodgy logic of wanting to ban a
secular holiday because a small number of people attach religious significance to it...
good luck, kid. You got an
uphill battle ahead of ya.
And of course, Halloween certainly does have its origins in many
pre-Christian and pagan
customs. If that's enough to warrant the end of the holiday, then you better get ready to say good-bye to Christmas and Easter, too. Both of them include popular customs which originated with
pagans -- including Christmas trees, Easter eggs, Santa Claus, and even the date of Christmas itself. That's because, centuries ago, the
Catholic Church had a
policy of adopting
pagan customs into
church ritual in order to make it easier for the pagans to convert to
Christianity and stick with it. So the date of the
winter festival was converted to Christmas, the
druidic
veneration of
evergreens was adopted as the Christmas tree, and ancient customs of appeasing the
spirits of the dead in the autumn were
sanctioned by the church as part of
All Hallow's Day and
All Hallow's Eve. And if you're a staunch enough
fundamentalist to want to get rid of all holidays that have pagan
origins or
customs, well... again, good luck. This is just not your day.
On the bright side, despite the various enemies of Halloween, they are a very tiny
minority with very little real support. Most people view Halloween as a
fun and fairly
innocent holiday, a welcome dose of
thrills and
chaos in a dull and ordered world. It's going to be around for a long, long time.