Published: October 27, 2007 11:56 pm         

Halloween: Putting mask on grim reality

Editor’s note: This column was first published Oct. 31, 2001



Since the 1800s, when Irish immigrants brought the traditions of All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, to this country, Oct. 31 has been a time for dressing in costumes and going from house to house yelling trick or treat, with the residents offering treats in order to avoid having tricks played on them.

The origins of Halloween are rooted in Celtic Ireland and stem from 5th Century B.C.

Oct. 31 was the official end of summer in those days, and the holiday was called Samhain (pronounced sow-en), the Celtic New Year.

The legend was on that day, the disembodied spirits of those who had died during the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. Those who still were living did not want to be possessed, as you might imagine, and so would extinguish the fires in their homes to make them cold and inhospitable. The residents of the homes would then dress up in all manner of frightening costumes in order to frighten away the spirits looking for bodies to possess.

The custom of trick-or-treat is thought to have originated with a 9th Century European custom called souling. On Nov. 2, which was All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for soul cakes, which were square pieces of bread flavored with currents.

The more soul cakes the beggars received, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of their benefactors. Back then they believed the dead stayed in a kind of limbo for a time after death, and prayer, even by strangers, could help a soul get into heaven.

Halloween has long been a time for pranks, as well. In the New England of the 1800s, the favorite pranks included tipping over outhouses and taking fence gates off their hinges.

Today’s pranks can range from soaping windows or festooning trees and bushes with toilet paper to much more destructive extremes. In Detroit, Oct. 30 is known as Devil’s Night. At its peak in 1985, 297 fires were set in the city on Devil’s Night.

Halloween is a time for everyone to become what they are not.

It is a day on which we can all act like children.

When I was a kid, Halloween was the best day of the school year, save for the last day before the start of summer vacation. On Halloween you got to wear your costume to school and then, usually midway through the afternoon, the books and pencils were abandoned in favor of red Kool-Aid and orange and black cookies shaped like witches and jack-o’-lanterns.

That night, after supper, we would get to go out with our friends, with someone’s dad or mom in tow, and roam our neighborhood, which, somehow didn’t quite look like our neighborhood in the dark, chill air with the moonlight filtering down through the bare branches of the trees, casting eerie shadows everywhere. Of course, nothing looked quite normal through the eye-holes of whatever mask we were wearing that year, no matter the lighting.

We would troop up to each doorstep carrying our sacks and yell trick or treat at the top of our lungs while ringing the doorbell. The door would open and the mom or dad who yelled at us for running through their flower beds just a couple of months before, oohed and aahed over our costumes. “Why, who are these people?” they would say, grinning. “I don’t know who any of you are,” and we would giggle at our clever deception.

They would then dump a handful of tooth-rotting delights in our sacks, we would yell thank you, as we took the steps two at a time and raced across the yard to the next house, all the while being exhorted to slow down and be careful by our chaperones.

But there was no slowing down and being careful on Halloween. It was all just too exciting.

Today many people say Halloween smacks of devil worship and idolatry. Others say it is not safe, especially in the wake of the horrors of Sept. 11.

How sad. This seems to be another case of a bit of mindless childhood fun being over-analyzed into near-oblivion by well-meaning but misguided adults.



Now, more than ever, it would seem we need to put on a mask and spend one evening doing something for no other reason than the pure enjoyment of it.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.