Whachamacalit
Today, in this neck of the woods, we broke a record for earliest accumulating snowfall that has stood since 1892.
Holidays with pagan roots are vastly more in tune with the cycles of nature than the artificial creations of politics and religion. I suggest we have Halloween/All Saints Day/Day of the Dead because (in this hemisphere) we are in a fortnight in which anything can happen and usually does. If one can have snow one day, unseasonable heat the next, and a hurricane the day after that, it is easy to think the boundaries of the palpable world are uncommonly shaky about now.
I've also been reading, with amusement, the contents of a Web list I'm on. There, maternal defensiveness has been outraged by the recent argument that Halloween candy horror stories are urban legends. The evidence, of course, is all on the side of the urban legends proponents. That does not deter the "friend of a friend of a friend" defence, which is of course the hallmark of urban legend.
One of the things I enjoy most about Halloween is that it endures despite all the people and institutions that hate it. It is disturbingly primal, after all: a feast of misrule that the forces of order and decorum are bound to detest. The earthiness defies the efforts of capitalist materialism to sanitise it and draw its fangs. American evangelicals hate it because it's "the devil's holiday." Jews hate it because it's paganism filtred through Christianity. There's a mainstream American protestant cultural suspicion of Halloween because those dirty Irish Catholics brought it here. (Very few people articulate that in such direct terms today, but it's there, and it's why doctrinaire conservatives hate Halloween.) Doctrinaire liberals apparently don't like giving kids a night off from the evils of candy (they of course never touch the stuff).
The summary is that if you enjoy giving the finger to convention, you like Halloween and will do things to rescue it from homogenisation. If you are a defender of order (no matter what flavour your establishment is) you can't and won't like it.
Holidays with pagan roots are vastly more in tune with the cycles of nature than the artificial creations of politics and religion. I suggest we have Halloween/All Saints Day/Day of the Dead because (in this hemisphere) we are in a fortnight in which anything can happen and usually does. If one can have snow one day, unseasonable heat the next, and a hurricane the day after that, it is easy to think the boundaries of the palpable world are uncommonly shaky about now.
I've also been reading, with amusement, the contents of a Web list I'm on. There, maternal defensiveness has been outraged by the recent argument that Halloween candy horror stories are urban legends. The evidence, of course, is all on the side of the urban legends proponents. That does not deter the "friend of a friend of a friend" defence, which is of course the hallmark of urban legend.
One of the things I enjoy most about Halloween is that it endures despite all the people and institutions that hate it. It is disturbingly primal, after all: a feast of misrule that the forces of order and decorum are bound to detest. The earthiness defies the efforts of capitalist materialism to sanitise it and draw its fangs. American evangelicals hate it because it's "the devil's holiday." Jews hate it because it's paganism filtred through Christianity. There's a mainstream American protestant cultural suspicion of Halloween because those dirty Irish Catholics brought it here. (Very few people articulate that in such direct terms today, but it's there, and it's why doctrinaire conservatives hate Halloween.) Doctrinaire liberals apparently don't like giving kids a night off from the evils of candy (they of course never touch the stuff).
The summary is that if you enjoy giving the finger to convention, you like Halloween and will do things to rescue it from homogenisation. If you are a defender of order (no matter what flavour your establishment is) you can't and won't like it.
posted by Uncle | 01:38
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