Halloween has evolved into an expanded public celebration. Merriment, good will, reality-bending apparel and make up is the privilege of any adult who wishes to imagine themselves as a child. Indeed, the child we once were endures as a dimension of our self-identity, so why not “come out to play” in the late afternoon of October 31st?

Halloween is the first of our fall holidays, when October often sees the first of autumnal frost. Then the look- forward is to Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving is our proper harvest festival, and we recall the myth of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal in harmony. We shouldn’t ever forget that myths are ideal truths, important, even if it happens to be a distortion of historical fact. 

Autumn festivals were common to our European ancestors. Halloween likely dates back 2,000 years to to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in), celebrated in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France. The Celts celebrated their new year on November 1, marking the end of the harvest and summer, and the start of a cold, dark winter often associated with death. On the night of October 31, they believed the boundary between the living and the spirit world thinned, allowing ghosts and spirits of the dead to return to Earth. 

Halloween properly is linked to 8th century Pope Gregory III who designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows’) to honor all saints and martyrs. 

A final note: my appreciation of Halloween is renewed as an adult. The child-within wants to touch the splendor of autumn colors, to savor the smell of burning leaves, to frolic through the neighborhood greeting neighbors, or to accept from a stranger a cinnamon flavored “adult drink.” Festival is a welcome respite, a temporary seclusion from the vicious verbal attack of the political arena, a timely opportunity simply “to be human“.*

The images were captured yesterday!

  * “Seien wir menschlich” (Let us be human.) – Ludwig Wittgenstein.