“THIS IS HALLOWEEN” by Jessica H

      Everyone has heard of this notorious song from the Nightmare before Christmas. The on slaught of repetitions of “This is Halloween’s” almost serves as a yearly alarm clock, warning us of the quickly approaching winter, of another year gone by, of the beginning of a new holiday season. For some, this may just be a slightly unpleasant experience as holiday songs start to get stuck in their heads for the umpteenth time. For others, this holiday is a celebration of their lifestyle, a central part of their self-identity. And still yet for others, this may just be a chance to score some free candy. For me, it has always been a holiday shrouded in mystery, literally. I had never really understood the hype of it. How has an outdated holiday about scaring away spirits, a macabre holiday celebrating fear, the unknown, and death gained so much cultural relevance,especially in a time in which the majority of the population does not believe in the undead anymore?

      If you were to explain Halloween to someone completely oblivious of its cultural background and significance, you may start by off defining its origins in Ireland, where in Celtic tradition,people drove away mischievous spirits on All Hallow’s Eve, a time in which they believed that the souls of the dead would come to back Earth and the souls of the newly dead would journey on to the afterlife (“Halloween”). However, Europeans were not the only ones fascinated with death. For example, ghosts and spirits have been recognized, celebrated, and feared in African,Asian, and Hispanic cultures as well. From a pragmatic standpoint, this kinda makes sense.People used to live such nasty, brutish, and short lives. They arbitrarily died at young ages from diseases, and they blamed it on the supernatural because science, medicine, and germ theory were not mainstream knowledge. It made more sense that there were terrifying ghosts and spirits luring people to their graves on eerie late-autumn nights than invisible microscopic organisms interfering with a person’s homeostasis. In these societies, holidays similar to Halloween held cultural significance because it symbolized their fears of death, which seemed to be lurking around every corner, ready to reap any unsuspecting human souls. It was a mark of the irresistance to death when they lacked other means of deterring it. If they believed that they could ward off spirits by lighting fires and wearing costumes to disguise themselves, it gave them a sense of power in a time in which they felt so vulnerable with their own sense of impending mortality. 

      The person who you are explaining this to might all of a sudden go, “Yeah, that makes sense.But why do we still celebrate it?” On a superficial level, they may have a point. It’s an outdated holiday based on outdated primal human emotions. However, you still have yet to explain the significance this holiday has in our current modern society. Although most people don’t believe in the supernatural or in ghosts or spirits or any impending unexplainable doom, there is a new fear: a fear not of physical death, but of ​metaphysical ​death. It is so common for people in our society to be “dead on the inside.” So many people seem to work jobs that they don’t like, or feel like that they are always “burnt out,” or are forced into going to school when they don’t even seethe point of being alive. For a brief day, the spirit of Halloween gives us a vacation from the seemingly pointless institutions that trap us and kill our souls. It allows us to explore the meaning of being alive on a more purposeful level; it gives us a chance to be human in a world that sometimes values us more as cogs in a machine, to explore your individuality, one of the most important parts of being alive, through limitless choice in costume and expression. On Halloween, you can escape all the other hardships that plague your life the 364 days of the year.

 

Works cited“Halloween.” ​Encyclopædia Britannica​, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Oct. 2020,www.britannica.com/topic/Halloween.