The world is a scary place, this much we know, but on Halloween it actually becomes a lot less scary to me. It’s like someone is having a fancy dress party, and absolutely everyone is invited, people give each other chocolate, candies, and all kinds of other treats just because you turn up at their door. Try doing that on any day other than October 31st and I guarantee that your candy to slammed door ratio with change very drastically. Also, don’t you think that its kind of funny that a night that is meant to be scary and filled with dark rituals has largely been transformed into a clean and sanitized day in which kids have fun, are told that its okay to take candy from strangers “just for today”, and that if you don’t get given any candy its totally cool to chuck eggs at their door and throw toilet paper over the carefully manicured tree in the middle of the lawn. Oh, and for the adults, parties where all the drinks are green and all the women turn up in costumes that come with the prefix of ’slutty’.
Let’s take a look at the history of Halloween, according to that actually quite reliable resource, Wikipedia:
Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain. The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.” Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.
Like I said, that is a pretty dark story, oh, and the fun pumpkins that you carve with your kids? Also kinda dark:
Originating in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the “head” of the vegetable to frighten off any superstitions.
As a man of science, I know that superstitions are actually have a very high likelihood of being ’supersilly’, but are we really meant to believe that the Celts thought carving a face in a turnip (a turnip!) and putting a candle in it had the awesome power of being able to frighten off any (any!) superstition?
Now that I think about it, the turnip with a candle in it actually did work, in much the same way that Lisa Simpson’s Tiger-repelling rock does, you carved a face into a turnip, stuck a candle in it, and none of the dead returned to the land of the living to kill you and ruin your crops for the coming year, so its hardly surprising that they continued to employ the TCDS (Turnip + Candle Defence Mechanism) for so long.
Entries (RSS)