Hearth To Hearth

by Donna Tavano

Hailing Halloween 

                For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved Halloween.  My senses long for the annual assault by orange and black crepe paper, sweet confections, and spooky, unearthly wailing.  I’m not alone; Halloween is now considered one of highest grossing and most popular holidays.

                Perhaps people love Halloween because it occurs in autumn which, itself, is such an alluring season. The air is often balmy, but can change in the snap of a twig from “dog-days of summer” steamy to hurricane horror show.  September’s foliage begins without fanfare as the green which has been hanging around since spring; kind of a been there, done that backdrop.  In a Jack Frost minute, it can morph into the riotous “to die for” display of scarlet and screaming yellow that leaf-peepers (those herds of  maple syrup-seeking, slow moving folk, cattle-carted in charter buses, who stampede the roadside restaurant at which you are attempting to dine) live for.  Then, in a self-scripted tragedrama, the autumnal diva stomps off the stage, leaving us to morosely contemplate barren, black skeleton limbs and crooked branches, breathlessly clutching the vapid air, seemingly bereft of life.

                How can anyone not adore a holiday which embraces the sentiment “No Gift Giving Required?”  Well, that’s not exactly true; treating those itty, bitty potential trickster vampires and princesses who come a knockin’ at your door, expecting a delectable handout or two, is akin to gifting.  But this October dispensing of Hershey bars, candy corn and caramel apples is hardly fraught with the financial or familial ramifications of traditional holiday gift giving.  Stock up on a few Reeses, Milky Ways or Kit Kats and you’re good to go.  There’s no need to max out credit cards, waste hours searching online for the new Wii game, which will inevitably flood the market two months hence at a much reduced price, or risk H1N1 waiting in lines of coughers and sneezers, to exchange the apparently cloned, nose blinking, Rudolph sweater Aunt Harriet has so sweetly bestowed upon you for the third year in a row.

                Halloween gives all of us boring nobodies a risk-free chance to flirt with dreams and fantasy.  Kids get to control those terrifying monsters of their nightmares by becoming frightening demons themselves.  Grown-ups, likewise, can recapture their youth, and for one night, try on a powerful or sexy personality --- a cameo role they would never attempt to adopt without a mask behind which they can hide. 

                To the so politically correct organizations who, in efforts to “comply,” trip over themselves so often they’re usually found in a heap (you know who you are), by not allowing kids to sing Halloween songs or decorate Jack o’lanterns --- get over yourselves.  Who cares whether Halloween started as a pagan celebration (Samhain) which the Christian powers-that-be managed to spin their way (All Hallows Eve).  I guarantee there was a time in human development, when all men and women worshipped just about everything --- whatever got them through those long, dangerous, hungry, painful, naked days and nights.  This primal cultural celebration was a natural segue from the warmth and relative ease of summer and reaping of bountiful harvests to the fear-filled reality that winter was fast approaching, a season which represented darkness, death and destruction, a period devoid of much obvious life and sustenance.  At that time and this, folks appreciated, and still do, a chance to carve out a gourd or pumpkin whose scary face and fiery glow will cast light into the darkness and just might keep the boogeyman from the door for one night.   Happy Halloween!

10/22/09