Hallowe’en sort of opens the door to the end-of-year holy days of the church. Technically the liturgical year ends with the last Sunday of Pentecost, Reign of Christ Sunday, or in the German tradition of my church, the Totenfest. The last Sunday of Pentecost is always the Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent. The First Sunday of Advent is always the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is a fixed date. Like Hallowe’en; always the last day of October, because it’s the eve of All Saints Day, which is always November 1.
So the dates that change are the Last Sunday of Pentecost, and the first Sunday of Advent. We’ve gone a long time without a holiday since Easter (there are feast days on the Catholic calendar, and Reformation Sunday for some Protestant churches, but in the American secular world it’s a drought relieved only by the Fourth of July and maybe Labor Day.) Starting October 31st we catch up, setting ourselves up for Christmas beginning with a December meant to be a festival, but is more often just a chore.
Anyway, Hallowe’en is our gateway. Hallowe’en in October, Thanksgiving in November, and all of December culminating with Christmas Eve and Christmas and, if you’re lucky, Christmastide through January 1. The six weeks between Epiphany (Twelfth Night) and Lent were once observed as a joyful time capped by the raucous Mardi Gras ending precisely at midnight of Ash Wednesday, the gateway to Lent. If you’re counting, that’s four “eves” that are really more celebrated than the days that follow them, from October to March. Not sure what that means, but I’ll try to get back to you on it.
I've posted some variations of this before. This year the introduction is new. Hey, this site is free, right? Besides, I came across this, complaining about Hallowe'en because, implicitly, it's not an "actual holiday":But at least Christmas is an actual holiday with deep religious roots. Not everyone has been seduced by its commercialism. And if you want to ban Christmas celebrations during school hours, that’s probably not a bad idea either.
Some of my best childhood memories revolve around Hallowe'en. My mother's youngest sister, the "crazy" aunt who came to our church Halloween party (this was when I was just barely too old to wander the streets at night with the "children"), put on makeup to look like a corpse in a coffin (an early version of "Beetlejuice," mostly), and then joined us to bob for apples (probably the first time I'd done that, and I found out what hard, wet work it is. And what absolutely foolish fun.). Or just the freedom of wandering the streets at night without my parents in tow, joining all the neighborhood kids of the Baby Boom as we walked from house to house in clumps that gathered and broke again, passing stories of where to get the best candy, or the homemade stuff like popcorn balls and caramel apples, stuff always gone by the time you got there, or always from a house several streets over of undetermined location or ill-defined description. And the story always included that house being "out" by the time your heard of it. It prepared us for Christmases when we'd have to find the "IT" toy for our kids in an unforeseeable future. My wife dressing up in black tights and leotard as a "cat" for our daughter's first Hallowe'en a mere five months after giving birth....oh, wait. You don't need to hear about that one.
I still send my Aunt a Peanuts Hallowe’en card every year. She tells me she’s kept them all, which is nice to think about.
All the internet bluster about Hallowe'en and Samhain seems to have faded now, as well as the business of Hallowe'en being "stolen" from "ancient practices." Most of that is echoing remnants of the early 19th century, Romanticism turning into Victorianism. It was the Romantic movement that began to preserve "folklore," as it came to be called. "Came to be" not because it was illegitimate, but because it was ignored and despised before the Romantics, who saved it but didn't actually revive it. They did make it respectable literature, no mean feat.
The Victorians then supercharged it, along with fuzzy memories of medieval Europe. Most of the ghost stories and "monsters" we know now (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, etc.) are products of the Victorian imagination, not remnants of stories told around campfires 3 millenia ago. The Victorians tried to link them to an imagined past to make them "authentic" in a risingly scientific age, but the connections are horseshit. Most of those stories are distinctly "modern." (Mary Shelley made her "creature" a blend of science and alchemy. Bram Stoker, at the other end of the century, relied solely on "folklore" that, mostly, he made up. But his novel bristles with what was then cutting edge technology, mostly for verisimilitude.)
Tower Bridge was created by Victorians to be a "medieval" bridge, complete with turrets (all built mostly to hide the drawbridge mechanism). If you're familiar with Neuschwanstein, the castle that looks like it belongs in Disneyland; that's Victorian era, too.
"Modern" means as modern as Poe's stories, most of which are conveniently set in a Europe of an indeterminate age when people dressed in what is now costume and ran around in castles and buildings that look more like something from a Disney themepark than reality. And Poe was an American Romantic writing in the mid-19th century, in America. Again, the connection to an imagined past gave the stories the verisimilitude they required.
So most of our Hallowe'en is a matter of memory and conjecture, and the stories we tell ourselves. But it isn't rooted in some "truth" we destroyed with our "enlightenment" or our "progress." As with most things, our "truth" about these matters is what we say it is.
All Saint's Day, per New Advent, started in...well, here, let me just give you the whole magilla:
In the early days the Christians were accustomed to solemnize the anniversary of a martyr's death for Christ at the place of martyrdom. In the fourth century, neighbouring dioceses began to interchange feasts, to transfer relics, to divide them, and to join in a common feast; as is shown by the invitation of St. Basil of Caesarea (379) to the bishops of the province of Pontus. Frequently groups of martyrs suffered on the same day, which naturally led to a joint commemoration. In the persecution of Diocletian the number of martyrs became so great that a separate day could not be assigned to each. But the Church, feeling that every martyr should be venerated, appointed a common day for all. The first trace of this we find in Antioch on the Sunday after Pentecost. We also find mention of a common day in a sermon of St. Ephrem the Syrian (373), and in the 74th homily of St. John Chrysostom (407). At first only martyrs and St. John the Baptist were honoured by a special day. Other saints were added gradually, and increased in number when a regular process of canonization was established; still, as early as 411 there is in the Chaldean Calendar a "Commemoratio Confessorum" for the Friday after Easter. In the West Boniface IV, 13 May, 609, or 610, consecrated the Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, ordering an anniversary. Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November. A basilica of the Apostles already existed in Rome, and its dedication was annually remembered on 1 May. Gregory IV (827-844) extended the celebration on 1 November to the entire Church. The vigil seems to have been held as early as the feast itself. The octave was added by Sixtus IV (1471-84).
So, mid 9th century, All Saints got set as a date on the Church's calendar, having started as a feast day under Gregory a century earlier. That led, later, to All Soul's on November 2. It was so important a day it acquired an “Eve,” as did, later, Christmas. I don’t know of any other date on the Christian calendar that has such an honor. (Easter has Holy Saturday, but nobody considers that “Easter Eve.”)
So, no, All Saints Day isn’t as “deeply rooted” as Christmas (4th century), but it’s old enough.
The connections to Ireland, especially jack o'lanterns (turnips in Ireland, only after a long period exclusively pumpkins, which are as American as corn and tobacco), didn't really come until the 19th century. Attempted connections between the Irish Samhain and All Saint's are all pretty much retrojection, especially as an attempt to connect Hallowe'en to Irish practices it supposedly overtook. Gregory was a long way from Ireland in the 8th century and Christianity only reached the island in the 9th century. It's a pretty small tail wagging a pretty large dog to imagine Gregory picked the date for the entire church just to appeal to an Irish pagan festival in a land that hadn’t yet learned of Xianity and when it did, was still on the fringes of “civilization.”
The vigil, by the way, that "seems to have been held as early as the feast itself," is Hallowe'en. That vigil appears in the literature as early as Shakespeare, where the practices of the Roman church were slowly being turned Anglican; but that's another story. Curiously, most of the literature on Hallowe'en begins in the late 18th century, with Robert Burns in Scotland. It continues in the early 19th century with Walter Scott. It jumps the pond to Washington Irving's story of Ichabod Crane, where Disney (?; or someone before them) transforms the pumpkin into a jack o' lantern, which makes it a Hallowe'en story. And then we get Poe. The iconic black cat of Hallowe'en decorations arguably stems from Poe's story of the same name. By Poe's time, of course, especially in Puritan tinctured America, the holiday has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic vigil.
Interestingly, the Aztecs and Mayans (and even lesser known groups in Mexico) had festivals honoring the return of the dead. I can't say for sure the dates of the observances didn't shift after Christians changed the culture, but George Frazer found the Irish expecting the return of the dead around the end of October, which makes sense as people left the fields (farmers first, herdsman as it got too cold finally for the herds) and went indoors to survive the winter. Thinking of those lost is a likelier custom as winter sets in, especially in Europe. It seems to be have been as true in tropical Mexico, where the current Dios de los Muertos has very distinct roots in the culture of Mexico. Many of the practices of the days extend into pre-colombian times, including the idea that the children who have departed return on November 1, the adults on November 2. Did they adopt the Catholic dates? Maybe. It is certainly a festival that is far more "pagan" than it is "Christian." Not that there's anything wrong with that!
I noted one year (somewhere in my archives!) that there's still no concerted "War on Hallowe'en," even in years when we're told Skittles and other candies (not chocolate? Apparently not) are going to be replaced with “fentanyl candy” (I’m still unsure why anyone in possession of any fentanyl at all would want to give it away.) Anyway, that fear doesn't seem to have gotten as much traction as the “War on Christmas” ever did.
The original fears were foreign objects in homemade treats, so candy apples and popcorn balls disappeared (who's going to make those now, anyway? Easier to imagine drug cartels giving away fentanyl.). Now we have to fear packaged candy. It reminds me of a 70 year old essay by Margaret Mead (anybody remember her? She was a big noise once upon a time.) deriding the concept of an "age of anxiety." The term itself referred to the fear of nuclear war that hung over everything for 20 years or so (ah, yes, I remember it well.). Anyway, Mead pointed out that tribes in jungles and forests (and what is the difference, really? One is less "civilized" than the other?) lived lives faced with perils at every step (from the flora and fauna, basically), and we in "civilization" had no such fears of true imminent individual death. Well, compared to the fear of nuclear war, she was right. But today? What would she say today about blacks being shot by cops willy-nilly, or school shootings, or pandemics nobody wants to protect themselves from because of the inconvenience? Or people scared to death of drugs and razor blades in Hallowe'en giveaways? That one’s been around since I was on the streets after dark on October 31.
The Age of Anxiety is real, and it continues to plague us. Of course it does so largely because we continue to allow ourselves to be anxious. But I digress....
I have lamented the changing face of Hallowe'en. (Pro tip: when you can link to posts that are over 15 years old, you've been at this too long.) I have layered Hallowe'en into the more important rituals/holy days of our modern American calendar. I still think some reasonable connections can be made there. I'm going to try to keep that in mind as we move toward Advent. (Is Hallowe'en the gateway to Advent? Or just to All Saint's, which prepares us for the liturgical year's end?) I've commented on the "razor blades in apples" stories, though I think the reference there (to a Salon article, of all things) is less reliable than other information I have which provides a more specific date to the origin of all those stories.
I am now reliably informed that one of the earliest full mentions of Hallowe'en and its attendant celebrations is the poem by Robert Burns that I've posted before on October 31. I'll continue that tradition this year (what is a tradition if it doesn't continue?). Consider this just prelude, as Hallowe'en itself is prelude to All Saint's which, I would argue, is prelude to the end of Pentecost (the season of, I mean), and in that way preparation, itself, for Advent. Which is preparation, too. But there I go, getting ahead of myself again.
Mostly, Hallowe'en is for fun.
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