As a friend of mine observed recently, there is something medieval about Halloween. The masks, the running around in the dark, the flicker of candles in pumpkins, the smell of leaves and cold air—all of it feels ancient, even primal, somehow. Despite the now-inevitable preponderance of media-inspired costumes, Halloween seems, in execution, far closer to a Last Judgment scene above a medieval church door, or to a mystery play, than it does to Wal-Mart. To step outside on Halloween dressed as someone—or something—other than yourself is to step into a narrative that acknowledges that the membrane between our workaday, material world and the unseen realm of spirits is far thinner and more permeable than many of us like to think.
This narrative disturbs a lot of people, as the proliferation of church-sponsored “autumn festivals” and “trunk-or-treat” parties suggests. To some of those who worry about it, Halloween is either a thoroughly secular or a thoroughly pagan observance, to be avoided by serious Christians. In the Halloween aisle at Dollar Tree, you’ll certainly be hard-pressed to find anything remotely Christian on offer, unless you count glow-in-the-dark skeletons and black plastic skulls as memento mori designed to remind you that you are not Darth Maul, but dust.
The secular commercialization of Halloween bothers people far less than do its roots in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, which the Romans, after the conquest of Britain, eventually conflated with their own Feralia, a feast honoring the dead. When, in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV instituted the feast of All Saints, to fall on the first of November, the eve of that solemnity coincided with the date of the ancient festival. The addition of the feast of All Souls in the eleventh century completed the three-day Hallowmas, dedicated to the memory of the Christian martyrs and honoring all the faithful departed.
The absorption of pre-Christian cultic observance into the Christian calendar is not limited, of course, to holidays dealing with darkness and death. The Church settled on the date for Christmas by much the same process. Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money. There is a drama to be played out, like a mystery play in three scenes, and it makes sense only if you observe all three days of Hallowmas—not only Halloween but All Saints’ and All Souls’ days as well. In this context, the very secularity and even the roots-level paganism of Halloween become crucial elements in a larger Christian story.
I don’t especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader. This year three of my children are going as characters from the Lord of the Rings books, while my teenager has decided to be Lucille Ball. Christian children need not, as some do, dress as saints for Halloween to “redeem” it. There is something right, I think, in acknowledging on Halloween that the day for the saints has not arrived yet. This is salvation history, after all. We are saved from something—even if only from the ordinary, secular world of I Love Lucy, in which the sun rises and sets on Lucy’s dream of being in Ricky’s show.
What their costumes are is less important than the fact that, for a night, my children will be people other than themselves: each of them will be someone who, regardless of real-life fears about the dark, is not afraid to step out into the night. Armored inside their personae, they can laugh at the shadows, as well they should. On the one hand, the powers of darkness are no joke; on the other hand, although Christians have no traffic with these powers, we do not fear them.
On All Saints’ Day, our parish holds a children’s festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year’s appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around. The party is such fun that we could almost dispense with Halloween, whose festivities, as we observe them, are minimal by comparison. But the cumulative iconography of being, first, a secular character confronting darkness, and then a saint in light, is imaginatively powerful and valuable.
As our Hallowmas ends, the pageantry and excitement of Halloween and All Saints’ Day give way to the comparative quiet of the feast of All Souls. This final solemnity is a day without costumes. Having been denizens of the night and citizens of the household of God, the children step back into themselves to contemplate their own mortality and pray for our beloved dead. In three days they have enacted the story of their own eternal lives: from darkness to the hope of heaven and the joy of the saints who await them in glory. From mystery to mystery, it’s a drama I would not have them miss.
Sally Thomas, a contributing writer for First Things, is a poet and homeschooling mother in North Carolina.
Comments:
This is one of those ideas, I think, that's ultimately false and, unfortunately, often used in anti-Christian or particularly anti-Catholic polemics. See here for an article by the historian Dr. William Tighe, Calculating Christmas. He argues:
Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.
Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.
Anyway, Aurelian certainly did not choose the date in imitation of the Christians. He chose it because of the Winter Solstice, which was--for obvious reasons--already associated with the rites of solar deities. The 25th was the first day after the Solstice in which there was a discernible lengthening of daylight.
More significantly, though, why does Dr Tighe imagine that the Christians of Aurelian's time actually observed the 25th as the date for Christmas? All the evidence suggests that the date became fixed in Christian observance after the time of Constantine, well into the fourth century--which, again, suggests that the date of the Dies natalis solis invicti lay behind that of the Dies natalis Christi.
I'm a single mom with a young son who loves rituals and practices that help him experience the cycle of the Church year. Your article today has been such a blessing to our family. God bless you.
I hope your teenager is a female. Is this is "Dead Celebrity Party" context? I used to love those. One year I went as Sid Vicious and my GF as Nancy Spungeon. (My brother went as Bing Crosby.)
Actually, I tell people that all the time: the Church in her mercy, allows the Saturday evening Mass to count toward your Sunday obligation. Such an activity was new to the Church in the 1970s. In fact, the Sunday vigil Mass is not supposed to be a regular occurrence.
The only times that a Mass was celebrated prior to the Solemnity was on Easter: the Easter Vigil which began after sun-down. Even the Christmas Eve Mass was called the "Mass at Midnight"...meaning that it began on the actual day of Christmas. The Office of First Vespers is simply a preparation for the celebration of Holy Mass on Sunday: it has always been that way.
The Irish, who were the ones who celebrated Samhain, celebrated All Saints in the spring (as did a number of other places). The November celebration was originated by Germans, who obviously did not celebrate the Celtic festival.
I also like the differentiation between All Saints and All Souls. It is not part of Lutheran piety, which is a shame. There are some who are exemplary and worthy of emulation. And there are many blessed with quiet faith and peaceful rest. Many thanks.
We do actually put far more time and thought into All Saints in our household than into Halloween. And we're blessed to be part of a parish which throws a great party, to which my children look forward for months, and which also creates a community altar for All Souls and celebrates a solemn sung Mass.
I think the darkness-to-light imagery is powerful and important. Look at the way we celebrate the Great Vigil of Easter, for example: technically it's already Easter, yet we begin in darkness, as in the tomb, and we save our alleluias and our celebration until halfway through the service. It occurred to me at some point that a similar symbolic progression was inherent in the observances of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls -- though you really do have to celebrate all three for it to make any sense at all. I'm less interested in "redeeming" Halloween for its own sake -- or making anyone else feel "weird" for doing things differently -- than in seeing how it can lead us into the days that follow. Thats how I talk about it with my children, anyway.
One thing I didn't have room to mention in the article was that Halloween, at least at its best, is a neighborhood and community holiday which cuts across sectarian lines. The businesses on our town square stay open late on Halloween and hand out candy; last year my kids came home dripping with cheapo treasures from a carnival at the City Lunch diner. It's an evening when we see and speak to lots of our neighbors with whom we don't ordinarily cross paths. And in all the places I've lived, the spirit has been overwhelmingly child-oriented and friendly rather than otherwise.
We have learned to avoid some houses. You can look up registered offenders on the internet and not trick-or-treat to them; we also don't let any of our children, including the oldest ones, go out trick-or-treating without an adult. In our old neighborhood, there was one guy who used to dress up in a monster costume and sit on his front porch slumped in a chair as if he were a stuffed decoration. When trick-or-treaters came up his steps, he would explode terrifyingly to life. He didn't strike my husband, who witnessed this performance with our kids, as really a malicious person, just somebody overdoing the fun a bit. My older kids thought it was funny. Our youngest was really frightened by him, though, so she at least didn't go to his door again. And when we lived in an apartment complex, with lots of turnover and few people giving out candy anyway, we used to go to my mother's neighborhood, with known neighbors, rather than risking ourselves on the anonymous non-community behind its closed doors. That just seemed like the path of common sense.
And I would happily defer to either Dr. Tighe or Aime Cerf on the question of the dating of Christmas.
We can single out Christians who are more faithful to the whole of the faith for the same effect.
Mr Aukema says, "Even the Christmas Eve Mass was called the "Mass at Midnight"...meaning that it began on the actual day of Christmas." Actually (and again, it is still considered so in the Orthodox Church) the beginning of the day was for the earliest Christians at sundown (at the lighting of lamps) just as it was and still is for Jews. "Midnight" as exactly 12 a.m. is a very recent construct, and does not really enter in to the notions at work in a vigil service like pascha. The sun and not the clock is the operative agent.
It can be argued that, not only in the East but in the Latin West as well, the 6th of January was an all-encompassing feast of Theophany or "epiphany" in which the manifestation of Christ to the creation was the theme; the nativity would have been "duly noted," but in terms of institutional piety, Theophany (called epiphany in the west) is still a rather more important feast than Christmas in that it commemorates Jesus' baptism by John (NOT the visit of wise men) and the launch date of Jesus' earthly ministry.
While I was growing up as a kind of luke warm poor Catholic, we loved Halloween because we got so many candies. I guess the fact that I was an altar boy helped me to never play tricks on anyone and besides, I was too busy collecting goodies. :)
Truth be known, the stories that my dad told me about the spirits of the dead coming out of their grave on that night and if they saw mean thoughts in your heart then they could be tempted to act on them and take "IT" to their grave to feast on cause evil feeds evil. Go Figure!
I could honestly tell you at least one story that would make your blood run cold.
Although there was an incident that I could never forget, I was never really scared of Halloween because mom and dad always told me that "The Saints" were always looking over us if we didn't harm anyone and on all Saints Day was the day that The Saints made sure that all spirits went back to their grave where they belong until next year.
While growing up, I've never really clued in on this third day of souls but I can say that for a long time, I always make the sign of The Cross and ask God to Bless their souls when ever I pass a cemetery which brings the odd stares but I never really pay attention to "IT" and thanks to your post I'll now try to keep that third soul day in mind.
From the little that I've learned about you from your writing and kindness, if you're not a saint yet, Sally, for what "IT" is forth, I feel that you're getting pretty close. :)
God Bless,
Happy Hallowmas
Here is a nice reflection on halloween that you may like. Send it to any others you can think of ... "halloween as part of a triduum" of "all hallows eve", "all saints" and "all souls".
Enjoy....
Mark
Have you read Pope Benedict's “The Spirit of the Liturgy” and his beautiful interpretation of the placement of feast days for the birth of Jesus and the birth of John the Baptist? What is the link between the latter around the Summer Solstice, and the former near the Winter Solstice? B16 observes the days shorten after John’s feast, and lengthen after Christmas. Then he quotes John the Baptist (in John 3:30): “Now He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Would you tell someone sitting at Mass on a Saturday night that the Lord's Day hasn't arrived yet? In the tradition of the Church, the celebration of a Solemnity can begin on the eve before and thus the reason we choose to dress up as saints on All Hallows Eve. There are numerous other reasons that keep us from celebrating Halloween in what has become the secular way but I don't have any problem with someone who does (unless they try to imply that I am weird for choosing a different option). I really don't see how dressing up as Captain Kirk or Princess Ariel redeems the day for Christ but don't have a gripe with anyone who chooses to. My kids enjoy dressing up as Spiderman, fairy princesses and Jedi knights 364 days of the year. Wearing those costumes out of the house at night, would not help them overcome the fear of live snakes wrapped around neighbors distributing candy or registered s*x offenders.