Am I the only one who hated Halloween as a child? It terrified me. The thought of dressing up in costume pretending to be someone else held as much appeal as biting into a live rattlesnake. Seeing my friends in costumes was scary enough but when people who I couldn’t identify called me by name, laughed that Halloween-Dracula laugh, and demanded I give them candy… or else…well let’s just say it was pee my pants time. I didn’t like the idea of costumes depicting frightening fantasies, “coming back from the dead” to haunt those of us left on the planet, or the deliberate attempt of others to scare the bejesus out of each other, or the whole go to stranger’s homes and ask for candy thing.
I didn’t like seeing people in “benign” costumes either. Even those gave me the creeps.
So, thanks Mom, but NO I don’t want to be Snow White for Halloween.
To complicate Halloween for me, the following day is a holy day that was celebrated in my very Irish very Roman Catholic diocese. We honored All Souls Day that, if I remember correctly, falls the day after Halloween. Somehow in my little girl mind I decided that the church sanctioned this fear fest called Halloween or All Hallows E’en as the Irish call it, because it was somehow a warm-up to All Souls Day.
I concluded that Halloween was simply the rehearsal for the real All Soul’s Eve to come on the following night in which actual Born Again Dead Souls returned to participate in some kind of a planetary reunion. For years I went to the required early morning Mass with my family and prayed that no lost soul would knock on my door that night.
All I could do was hope that Newport was too small a place to hold that big of a party.
Yes, I know I am big on my happy, bouncy, loosely curled red hair, my cornflower blue eyes and my freckled skin. I adore making an incredibly big deal about my Irish heritage, but All Hallow’s E’en followed up by the main attraction, All Soul’s Day, was one Celtic Catholic tradition that I just didn’t want any part of.
My mother’s Irish roots are in County Cork, and my dad’s are in County Mayo, one of the homes of the Druids. Ireland’s October 31st back in the day was the holiest of the Druid’s High Holy days. November 1st was considered the New Year, so All Hallows E’en was basically New Year’s Eve. However, the Druids didn’t drink champagne or toss their scribed resolutions into a great big community bon fire to usher in the New Year. Instead, what they did was drink wassail-like beverages from giant-sized tubs and engage in a practice of predicting what the next year held in store for them by observing the behaviors of four and (yes) two legged captives who were tossed into the Druid All Hallows E'en sacrificial fires.
And, no, these practices were not a lively topic of conversation in my childhood home, but my deeply embedded Irish DNA has traditionally gotten just a wee bit restless around this time of year.
I’m not sure what any of this means from my cliffside God view, but two things are clear to me.
I still don’t like Halloween and I probably (at this stage of the game) will never care for it.
And that being said, I will open my door 267 times tonight and give out candy to those who do.
Happy Halloween.
No comments:
Post a Comment