Halloween

 

It is the season again of faux cobwebs over front fences, rubber skeletons dangling from porches, and plastic pumpkins with handles for collecting sweets. It’s weird, in a familiar weird way. Pumpkins themselves flourish in autumn or, as they say in North America, fall, which is a fairly major clue to this festival being a late import to Australia. “Mists and mellow fruitfulness” for a Queensland Blue arrive other times of year. Ritualists appreciate Australian Halloween as a springtime festival, first and foremost because it’s when children in bands invade the streets in costumes. Not just the usual spooky costumes like witches and draculas, but almost any costume: superheroes and ballerinas and gladiators. Every conceivable springtime colour, every imaginable excuse to dress to excess, every possible future. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. The neighbours oblige. Interestingly, it is the only festival when children meet large numbers of neighbours (known and unknown) on an equal basis, each year, and get to look inside their houses at close range. Halloween breaks down invisible barriers, invites discovery rather than fear. Not deathly, but lively. Knowledgeable adult pranksters argue for the season’s “pagan roots”, as they busy the children with Ziggy Stardust makeup and K-Mart capes, choosing to ignore that Halloween is self-descriptive of the night before All Saints’ Day, and the day that follows, All Souls’. It’s a bit like Mardi Gras. To really understand the festival itself you cannot have Mardi Gras without the day that follows, Ash Wednesday – because that’s the reason for Mardi Gras. I don’t see many trick-or-treaters going next day to pray to the saints, or the following day commemorating the dead. If I were to mention this to them, they’d probably think I was weird, in a weird way. Discussion is better kept safe and consumerist with the No Religion crowd. They are capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal. Can those who have everything go begging for something just slightly more than nothing, from the people next door? Yet for all that, it is the season of holy possibilities, the season of giving thanks and remembering those who have departed. Any time is a good time to share that reality. And Halloween is a start, it may be argued, children getting together in an organised fashion to meet strangers at the doorstep, in their very own street. They even sing a prepared song to extract free food. Plenty of time to learn whose love is unconditional, even their own. Time to learn how little time there ever was for anyone. Safely home they study their bonbons, enjoy the evening meal together, fold up their costumes (some throw them on chairs for someone else to figure out), and retire to bed with a book of ghost stories. Tomorrow is another day, as ritualists are wont to observe.