It’s here… tomorrow night. Halloween. The weirdest holiday on the calendar, after Labor Day, when we celebrate work by – wait for it – not working. This holiday focuses on ghosts and disembodied spirits of various and sundry types. And we combine that with kids going door-to-door asking for candy wearing costumes, while some people “decorate” their front yard with headstones to make it look like a graveyard, or string up fake cobwebs to make their house look scary and abandoned. As a boy, I hollowed out a North American winter squash, known as a pumpkin, carved a face on it, and proudly displayed it on our front porch with a lit candle inside so at night the face glowed in the darkness.
If you were to describe all this, as I just did, to an alien visiting from another planet, we’d need to discuss psychotropic medication and a secured facility for you to live in since you’re talking to aliens. But still, explain Halloween to someone that has no history with or experience of it, and it all seems rather daft. Why ghosts and sundry spirits? Why costumes? Why candles inside hallowed out gourds? Why go door-to-door? Thank your lucky stars you have me to answer the questions you didn’t even know needed asking.
We’ll start with the pumpkin. The annual trip to pick out my pumpkin at “little Ralphs” on Central Avenue in Glendale was an exciting time; differentiated by my mother from “big Ralphs” on Glenoaks & Brand, little Ralphs had been an independent, family-owned grocery store named Crawfords (seen at left in the late 60s when mom and I used to shop there) until they sold out to the Ralphs chain of supermarkets, but we already had a Ralphs in town across from church, so Crawfords became “little Ralphs” for evermore in the Wilkinson household. As usual, I’ve led you on a long walk down a deserted beach to a café that was closed. Let’s get back on track.
The real excitement was getting my pumpkin home. Mom would clear off the table in the breakfast nook, cover it with newspapers, cut the top off my pumpkin, then give me a ladle with which to scoop my pumpkin’s innards out into a big pile of goop and seeds. When he got home from work, my dad would carve the “face,” but precisely following the pattern I had drawn on the front of the pumpkin with a magic marker. And when nighttime came, my parents let me light a candle we’d placed inside it then run across the street to the Masterson’s house to admire its fiendish glow on our porch from afar through the dark. May I present to you: the jack-o’-lantern.
The story, told by the Irish, is a man named Stingy Jack tricked the Devil and was condemned to wander the earth with only a carved turnip to light his way. When the Irish emigrated to America, they began using pumpkins instead of turnips, and the practice became a fixture of Halloween meant to ward off evil spirits.
But surely, if you’re concerned about evil spirits they don’t limit their malevolent activity to one night (or season) a year, or do they? Halloween as a “day” has its origins in the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain, celebrated on October 31st, a date approximately halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It marked the end of the harvest season and the start of the dark, cold winter months; in Celtic belief, the year was split into two halves — light and dark — and Samhain marked the beginning of the dark half. Druids and pagans considered Samhain the spiritual new year, and people believed that during the nights surrounding it the veil between the dead and the living was at its thinnest, with the dead thought to cross over from the realm of what lies beyond to roam the earth and attend to unfinished business at this time. For protection, people lit bonfires or carried lanterns at night (precursors to our friend the evil repelling jack-o’-lantern).
In the 8th century CE, the Catholic Church got involved. Catholicism is a syncretistic religion – religious syncretism is the blending of belief systems into a new system, or the incorporation of other beliefs into an existing religious tradition; it’s one of the ways the Catholic Church, besides being the only game in town until Martin Luther mucked everything up by nailing his 95 questions to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, spread its influence throughout Western Europe and eventually the New World… “look how your stuff fits in with our stuff!” So Pope Gregory III proclaims November 1st to be “All Saints Day,” a “feast day” dedicated to celebrating those of exemplary virtue who had passed. The night before, traditionally Samhain, was absorbed into this Christian festival and named “All Hallows Eve” (the night before the day we celebrate all the halos, i.e., “saints”) which would later be shortened as a matter of spoken expediency to “Halloween.”
At its core, Halloween is about suggesting that there is interaction between the living, tangible material world around us and the unseen world occupied by the dead and spirits of various types. Which is where the ghosts come in.
But where does the going door-to-door asking for candy come into it? Well, thoughtful reader, I’m glad you asked. This custom derives from practices common in medieval Ireland and England: the poor visited homes the day after All Hallows Eve on All Saints Day (November 1st) to beg for food and in return they promised to pray for the souls of the deceased from any household giving them alms on All Souls Day, another feast day set aside for Catholics to remember all who have died (not just saints) that is observed the following day, on November 2nd; this door-to-door begging was called “souling.” By the 1800s, children in Scotland devised an ingenious way to mimic the souling in order to fill their bellies: they would disguise themselves in costumes (so as not to be recognized by their neighbors) and go door-to-door asking for treats – this came to be known as “guising” and it was guising that those emigrating to the United States from Ireland and Britain brought with them, a practice that gradually evolved into what we now call trick-or-treating.
With this historical perspective, we can see that the basic gist of Halloween goes back millennia to a time when the changing of the seasons was a significant event with life-or-death implications and to when the supernatural commanded and preoccupied the human imagination. Whether we are celebrating the harvest, remembering and honoring our dead ancestors, warding off evil spirits, or just looking for a guilt-free excuse to eat candy, what began as a pagan festival has transformed and developed through the centuries into what we know today.
And probably a huge boon for dentists.