Oct 28 JDN 2458420

I suppose most holidays are weird if you look at them from an outside perspective; but I think Halloween especially so, because we don’t even seem to be clear about what we’re celebrating at this point.

Christmas is ostensibly about the anniversary of the birth of Jesus; New Year’s is about the completion of the year; Thanksgiving is about the founding of the United States and being thankful for what we have; Independence Day is about declaring independence from Great Britain.

But what’s Halloween about, again? Why do we have our children dress up in costumes and go beg candy from our neighbors?

The name comes originally from “All Hallow’s Eve”, the beginning of the three-day Christian holiday Allhallowtide of rememberance for the dead, which has merged in most Latin American countries with the traditional holiday Dia de los Muertos. But most Americans don’t actually celebrate the rest of Allhallowtide; we just do the candy and costume thing on Halloween.

The parts involving costumes and pumpkins actually seem to be drawn from Celtic folk traditions celebrating the ending of harvest season and the coming of the winter months. It’s celebrated so early because, well, in Ireland and Scotland it gets dark and cold pretty early in the year.

One tradition I sort of wish we’d kept from the Celtic festival is that of pouring molten lead into water to watch it rapidly solidify. Those guys really knew how to have a good time. It may have originated as a form of molybdomancy, which I officially declare the word of the day. Fortunately by the power of YouTube, we too can enjoy the excitement of molten lead without the usual fear of third-degree burns. The only divination ritual that we kept as a Halloween activity is the far tamer apple-bobbing.

The trick-or-treating part and especially the costume part originated in the Medieval performance art of mumming, which is also related to the modern concept of mime. Basically, these were traveling performance troupes who went around dressed up as mythological figures, did battle silently, and then bowed and passed their hats around for money. It’s like busking, basically.

The costumes were originally religious or mythological figures, then became supernatural creatures more generally, and nowadays the most popular costumes tend to be superheroes. And since apparently we didn’t want people giving out money to our children, we went for candy instead. Yet I’m sure you could write a really convincing economics paper about why candy is way less efficient, making both the parents giving, the child receiving, and the parents of the child receiving less happy than the same amount of money would (and unlike the similar argument against Christmas presents, I’m actually sort of inclined to agree; it’s not a personal gesture, and what in the world do you need with all that candy?).

So apparently we’re celebrating the end of the harvest, and also mourning the dead, and also being mimes, and also emulating pagan divination rituals, but mainly we’re dressed up like superheroes and begging for candy? Like I said, it’s kind of a weird holiday.

But maybe none of that ultimately matters. The joy of holidays isn’t really in following some ancient ritual whose religious significance is now lost on us; it’s in the togetherness we feel when we manage to all coordinate our activities and do something joyful and out of the ordinary that we don’t have to do by ourselves. I think deep down we all sort of wish we could dress up as superheroes more of the time, but society frowns upon that sort of behavior most of the year; this is our one chance to do it, so we’ll take the chance when we get it.