Halloween - Chapter 1 : “Thys Yere The Towne Of Depe” (Part 1)
Halloween is at once the most orange-blooded American and the most other-worldly of holidays. With its roots in the spooky spirit-wanderings of Celtic lands, Halloween was brought to America by Irish and Scottish immigrants where it was quickly inflected with other folk traditions and American commercial values. Like Mardi Gras or Carnival, it offered respectable folk a chance to cast off their inhibitions for a night of cross-dressing revelry. In the era before moving pictures, it provided youngsters (and oldsters) with a live-action horror-movie spectacle they could enjoy from their own front porches while keeping a wary eye out for costumed cow-tippers and outhouse-rustlers. Halloween also emerged, especially in post-WWII America, as an opportunity for civic good behavior, as when children were asked to “trick or treat for UNICEF” and to forgo mischief and mayhem to join in well-regulated, twilight Halloween parades, with prizes given for imaginative costumes. In recent years, adults -- perhaps in search of their second childhoods -- have begun to reclaim Halloween as a grownup bacchanalia, thronging the streets of New York and Hollywood with extravagant and macabre floats, often with satirical and scatological political commentary.
But at its core, Halloween is the nation’s collective celebration of the otherworldly. More precisely, a collective celebration of the fact that there are indeed “things that go bump in the night” -- might a modern translation be “tweets that go trump in the night”? -- that scare us twitless. Though humans pride themselves on their third-millennium technology, there are still things so inexplicable that we can call them “otherworldly.” That there is still sufficient energy in the “thin spaces” to turn the world upside down. Halloween is perhaps our most secular affirmation of the power of the afterlife in human affairs.
Cultures the world over have, from early in the history of the species, responded in a plethora of complex and idiosyncratic ways to the perceived reality of the afterlife. Creative splendor, even ostentation, has been widespread, from the Egyptians who built pyramids to the Chinese who wash bones, from the Hindus who send cremated ashes down the Ganges to Americans who formaldehyde their loved ones and entomb them in Cadillacs. In divers and sundry ways has the human species responded with devotion, but also, on occasion, with downright irreverence to the way of all flesh.
For people in northwestern Europe, especially the British Isles, these responses have coalesced over millennia in the observance of Halloween, which originated among Celtic folk who marked the day as the passage from one year to the next, a spooksome night when the veil between this-world and next-world was briefly pierced. Brought to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Scottish and Irish immigrants, Halloween has of course become a blend of many ingredients in the American salad bowl. Though not officially celebrated in any of the fifty states, Halloween is able to fire up more celebrants than most other unofficial holidays with the possible exception of the shopping frenzies of Black Friday.
