We Are Not Brad Pitt

[from 10/27/10]

Having received a numerous accolade for last week’s History of Culture, I have decided to favor all with a History of Halloween this week. I began my research yesterday after dinner, so I should be finished by the end of my last paragraph.

There’s a lot of confusion about whether Halloween is a Pagan holiday or a Christian holiday. The name means “the day before All Saint’s Day,” which is the day Christians celebrate all the spare saints in the spare saint bin, all your Tom, Dick, and Harry saints. By that account it’s a Christian holiday.

But there’s also those who say Halloween is leftover from the Pagan Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain is a Gaelic word written with Gaelic spelling rules, so it’s not pronounced the way it looks. I believe it was pronounced “tooth decay” (silent final “n”.)

Samhain was much different from today’s Halloween, however. For example, there were no Jack-o-Lanterns carved from pumpkins. Instead they made Sean-o-Lanterns from hollowed out turnips. You probably think I’m kidding! We’re having fun now!

The Celtic year was divided between a dark half and a light half, with Samhain one dividing line. It was a time to let the dark and the dead mingle with the light and the living. That’s good reason to have people walking around pretending to be ghosts. It is not good reason to have people walking around being sexy cats, or dressed as packs of cigarettes, as Mario and Luigi, as an M&M, or as Karl Rove.

Samhain coincided with the turnip harvest. They had games like Bobbing for Turnips and Pin the Tail on the Turnip. By the end of Samhain, huge piles of turnips were set fire and people danced around them with glee, because by that time everybody despised turnips.

This brings us to the reason Trick or Treating started, which is the core of what we now think the holiday is about. It all began when the Celtic middle class vanished.

One day, the Celtic people looked around themselves, and there were no middle classes. There were only rich people and poor people. The rich people had candy and coins and fancy clothes and candles and soap, and the poor people had soot, sheets, and turnips. The poor people put their sheets on with the holes cut in them for their eyes and went door to door in the rich people’s neighborhoods, doing clever poor people dances to improvised armpit music, and expected candied turnips. When they didn’t get them, they shouted “Treat! Treat!” and burned the rich people’s houses down.

No, they didn’t burn the houses down. That was a fantasy of mine. Instead, having no toilet paper, only turnips, they “turniped” the rich people’s houses.

Today’s Halloween doesn’t look anything like that. We use Halloween to prove we are culturally savvy. It has nothing to do with dark versus light, nothing to do with the fact that we are not yet dead, and everything to do with the fact that we are not packs of cigarettes, not Brad Pitt, and not Karl Rove. We barely notice that it’s harvest season. Our Trick or Treaters don’t dance for their candy. They are lazy.

In spite of all that there are still those who persist in thinking that Halloween is a Christian holiday that somehow remains contaminated by Pagan influences, in much the same way that yoga is contaminated by demonic influences, and democracy is contaminated by Democrats.

What the Christians need is a Christian Halloween that gets rid of all Pagan influences once and for all, so there’s no more confusion about it.

My recommendation is for everyone involved to realized it’s just about what you’re afraid of, so if you are like Christine O’Donnell and you’re afraid of witches, then by all means dress as a witch for Halloween, just like old times. It isn’t contamination, it’s just something to fear.

The rest of us can Trick or Treat in Christine O’Donnell costumes.