Halloween: the day we set aside every year to solicit strangers’ houses for possibly tampered-with goods. Although massively commercialized by the sale of sexualized costumes and orange candy, Halloween has substantial roots as a tradition. It is based on the religious observance of All Hallows’ Eve, a time set aside for confronting death.
I’ve been a fan of Halloween since I was young. Something about the mixture of a free, large supply of chocolate and dressing up as various animals did it for me. I wasn’t originally too crazy about the scary part of the holiday. The section in Party City featuring disgusting latex masks gave me nightmares and the creepy gore-themed paraphernalia decorations made me vaguely nauseous. Nonetheless, I’ve grown to hold a morbid appreciation for the scare tactics that Halloween employs.
The pagans, Christians and Celtics may have sat around and thought about death and how much it scared them, but Halloween is no longer just about contemplating what it means to stop living. Every year, when we anticipate Halloween, we think hard about what itchy polyester outfit will make us seem the coolest at parties. We do not consider how we’re feeling about the fact that we’re going to die one day. We’ve grown complacent with our commercial conditioning, buying and eating lots of chocolate and relishing in the fact that for a day, anyone can prance around in cat ears and say that they’re Josie from “Josie and the Pussy Cats” and not seem insane. The traditional theme of Halloween is still relevant, and the fact that the holiday still retains an element of death proves this.
We just keep dressing up every year because we love rituals and chocolate, and we end up confronting death in new ways. Maybe you’re contemplating the death of your social life, sitting inside a house and intermittently handing out candy to 5-year-olds dressed in bed sheets, or your self-esteem, dressed as a couch potato at a party filled with sexy nurses. Maybe you are at a haunted house, crying at exorbitantly creepy zombie clowns chasing after you.
It’s not really common for people to sit down and think about lost loved ones on Halloween, or celebrate death. That’s another cultural observance called Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) that is sometimes confused with Halloween, as they both occur at the end of October. The two are distinct and the only reason that Día de Muertos is at the same time as Halloween is because the Spanish thoroughly commanded that the holiday be moved to make it more Catholic. The Day of the Dead remains a form of respect for death in cultures in which it’s celebrated, a far cry from the mockery which characterizes Halloween.
Through the costumes, the shameful binge-eating of sugar and the weird latex masks, we choose to interpret Halloween as a time to face death, whether that’s by succumbing to fear or by laughing in the face of our eventual demise. It’s not a time to think about the afterlife, or the dead people we know, but a time to freak each other out, laugh about that the fact that we almost killed ourselves with fright, and maybe get drunk in the process.