The Halloween promotion machine was already running at full speed by the first week after Labor Day. Supermarkets have almost given up selling real food to fill the aisles with candy and plastic pumpkins. Witches, skeletons, and gravestones have sprouted in our harmless suburb as if the Dark Ages had somehow broken through the thin façade of the twenty-first century. If you try to unravel the meaning of Halloween, you find an incoherent mix of pagan folklore, medieval superstitions, Christian mythology, ancient harvest-festival customs, and modern marketing techniques, all blended and served up as a historic national festival.
It all seems strange to me because I didn’t grow up in a Halloween culture. It is a local tradition and will never make sense to anyone who comes from a place where October 31st is just the last day of October. Every culture has these invented traditions, many of them surprisingly recent. In its modern, child-centered commercial form, Halloween is less than a hundred years old. Other invented traditions can be dated precisely and even credited to, or debited from, an individual inventor. Groundhog Day is one of the older ones, created by a local newspaper editor in1886. Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd invented Father's Day in 1910, and Mrs. Anna Jarvis invented Mother's Day two years later. President Roosevelt gave Thanksgiving Day as a gift in 1941. Lamar Hunt inspired the Super Bowl in 1967. If you grew up with these special days, they seem fixed and eternal, like the seasons themselves; if you didn’t learn about them in grade school, they seem odd. People invent new traditions all the time, either to promote a cause or simply to sell greeting cards.
The darkening time of year is rich in invented traditions all over the world: the Diwali Festival of Lights in India, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and in many Europeans nations Catholics and non-Catholics alike celebrate All Saints' Day, November first, by bringing flowers to the graves of dead relatives, and then going out to lunch at a restaurant. My beloved tradition is your weird foreign behavior.
My favorite invented tradition, because I grew up with it and therefore consider it entirely normal, is the British Guy Fawkes Night that falls on November 5. It commemorates a failed 1605 terrorist conspiracy, known as "The Gunpowder Plot," that was designed to blow up the English Parliament and the ruling monarch, King James I, in one big bang, but failed. The date is marked every year with bonfires, fireworks and a ceremonial burning of an effigy of the chief plotter, Guy Fawkes. The official line is that we celebrate the plot's failure. But, terrorist or not, Guy Fawkes has been celebrated as a national hero for four hundred years.
All traditions like this one were invented by someone at some point. The ones that last are the ones that are fun, or at least can be mistaken for fun, or presented as fun. Halloween gives us permission to wallow in the most primitive kinds of superstition, to put on masks and silly costumes if so inclined, to make a joke of the taboo subject of death, and to eat any amount of Halloween candy. It’s beginning to sound almost like fun.
