Fordtunate Son

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Halloween

Oct 30, 2023, 11:45 AM

BOO! It’s Halloween!

I got a request for some details on this most unusual of holidays, so let’s dig in.

Sure!

Halloween is a pretty well-defined holiday, now. But traditions can take a long time to sort out.
Some traditions make it, and others don’t.

Like the traditional Halloween Watermelon.

Today’s Halloween, though, is a fun chance for some spooks, some revelry, and a chance to show the people you care about just how special they are to you.

Or, maybe Halloween is just one more chance to get sloppy drunk and humiliate yourself in public.

Halloween is kind of a weird holiday. It doesn’t mark the passage of time like New Year’s Day.

It doesn’t celebrate any famous historical figures like President’s Day.

It’s not really expressing thanks like Thanksgiving.

It’s not really patriotic, like the 4th of July.

And it’s not even religious, like Christmas.

Halloween is just a weird holiday. So what the he77 is it all about?
It probably shouldn’t even be a holiday at all, except that people just love having holidays, any holidays.
So, the more the merrier, I guess.

Halloween was Joyful? W T F?

What is it with cheerfulness, and watermelons? No!

The name Halloween means “Hallowed’s Eve,” and as holidays go it’s really sort of a leech. A clingy, hanger-on type of celebration, if you will. It takes place on October 31, the night before we celebrate a legit holiday, All Saint’s Day, on November 1.

Look at all those halos

All Saint’s Day celebrates the thousands of Saints roaming around out there, far too many to count individually.
Like the patron saint of beer and space travel:

And St. Drogo, the patron saint of Gall Stones and Ugly People.

And St. Giles, the patron saint of lepers and breastfeeding.

And even St. Julian, the patron saint of carnival workers and mass-murderers.

So if November 1st and All Saint’s Day is for all those people,
Who is December 31st and Halloween for?

Well, one idea is that all the dead from the previous year who didn’t get Sainted, or at least get into Heaven, get one last night before they are condemned to He77.

The night of October 31 is their last chance to wreak some havoc on the living.

I for one am glad to learn that Halloween is actually celebrated on October 31. My parents always insisted we trick-or-treat on October 30 to avoid the crowds, so I could never understand why I was aways so alone and got so many doors slammed in my face; without so much as a single Hershey’s Kiss to show for it.

Costumes are probably the biggest part of Halloween. No one is quite sure where the tradition came from, but there are several ideas. One is that folks had to wear costumes to disguise themselves from those angry, angry spirits that were bound for he77 at the stroke of midnight on October 31.

Some folks have pretty good disguises.

A few people go the extra mile and work really hard on their disguises.

And some people just don’t give a shid.

Another idea is that very first costumes were substitutes for churches that were too poor to have cool relics.
For instance, if you couldn’t show the congregation this on November 1:

The tongue of Saint Anthony, in Padua, Italy

You could substitute another attention getter, like this, on October 31:

Or, if you weren’t lucky enough to possess Holy Breast Milk like the Chapel of the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem,

Saint Bernard and the Virgin, by Alonsa Cano, 1645.

You could always substitute lamb’s milk to get the people to church.

And if you couldn’t get your hands on the The Holy Foreskin, like in Calcato, Italy

A costume like this might be close enough for the congregation.

Some folks dress up as the Saints themselves for both Halloween and All Saints Day.

That’s ALL Saint’s Day

Another idea is that it Halloween, and its costumes, started as a sort of a Carnival from Hell, a “Dance Macrabre.” It was the wicked counterpart to those goody-two-shoes Saints who got all the attention the next day. “You rule the day, but we rule the night!”

Sort of a “Bad Boy’s Night Out” before the day of respectable citizens, or, a bachelor’s party for the dead.

Or, maybe just the Dance Macrabe was just a welcomed break from the pressures of having to be all good all the time.

But however it started, and whatever its roots are, Halloween is one crazy mish-mash of both pagan and Christian traditions now.
Think about how Christmas is a blend of Christian Nativity scenes…

and pagan Christmas trees.

Halloween is just like that. A mix of both pagan and Christian elements.

If you go back far enough, the word is that the pagan side of Halloween started in the 800s in Celtic culture.

Later, Scottish and Irish influences added to those ancient Fall harvest traditions. That’s why we have things like carved pumpkins…

And the even older Halloween tradition of carved turnips (since pumpkins are North American.)

The idea of Trick-or-Treating goes back to Scotch-Irish tradition of “mumming” from the 1500’s. That was the practice of people dressing up and visiting homes to sing or perform a short play. It was done on several holidays, but for Halloween, it was sort of like caroling for the dead.

Closely related to mumming was the practice of “souling”, which was going door-to-door to collect “soul cakes” for prayers. It was another way to keep communities closely knitted together.

Time to make the soul cakes!

Time to eat the soul cakes!

Time to clean up after the soul cakes.

Put the two together…mumming and souling, and you’ve essentially got your neighbors extorting food from you on pain of bad music. Hence, Trick-or-Treat.

The Jack-o-lantern tradition comes from the Irish legend of Stingy Jack in the 1830’s. Jack was a drunken a-hole who managed to trick the Devil into barring him from He77. That was great. But when Jack died, because he was a drunken a-hole, he couldn’t get into Heaven either.

Uh-oh

So the Devil, laughing his axx off, gave Jack a piping-hot coal. Jack put the coal in a gourd and now his spirit roams the earth, trapped between Heaven and Hell.

Jack inspired various alcoholic beverages to help those with similar dilemmas.

And finally, since there was nothing to do before the Internet, parlor games were a big part of early Halloween celebrations, too. This helped to keep people from dying from boredom and lack of pron.

The Apple Bob, for instance, goes way, way back.

And in the pagan tradition, magic and mysticism were big hits, too.

So that’s the quicky version of Halloween. Other traditions were added, like Haunted Houses and mass-produced candy, in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

And things like the watermelon have dropped out. But before we go, let’s remember that one thing has remained constant since the earliest days of Halloween.

Witches. Hot then, hot now.