Halloween

 

Lawns are being turned into massacre sites. Once more it’s the season of faux cobwebs over fences, but this year the spiders are three times larger than last year, spreadeagled across windows or crawling artistically from letterboxes. It’s familiar weird, but this year feels different. Consumer excess has multiple skeletons dangling from porticoes and eucalypt branches. Skulls emerge from soil requiring the attention of a host of forensic pathologists. By the time the frisky kids in superhero costumes hit the streets on the 31^st, it’s a wonder what they will make of their normally death-denying neighbours who have turned their front gardens into graveyards. It’s a question that hangs in the air, skeleton-like, as I walk the streets on my constitutional. How many gravestones must they navigate in order to ask trick or treat? Gigantic plastic pumpkins on footpaths are another hurdle, several times larger than any known pumpkin and seemingly the results of a nuclear accident, they come in a lurid orange more excessive than the hair dye of the erstwhile American president. What are the young witches and draculas and ballerinas and gladiators to make of their neighbourhood, as each place they visit competes in making their home the bestest horror movie set in the street, dripping with blood. The other week was the referendum. It reminded us that the entire land of Australia is a graveyard, where the dead are many. At least, that was an underlying reality of the referendum, which in simple language terms was about giving people a voice. Remembering those who have departed this life was an essential, though largely unmentioned, reality behind why people said yes or no to a voice. The autumnal resonances of Halloween in our consumer culture have been transformed, necessarily in Australia in October, into a springtime funtime for children and occasional adults. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. Neighbours oblige. They dash unthinkingly over the land of roadmap grids and ‘creepy’ front gates, over the land where (see above) the dead are many.  The tricksters and treaters seem capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal, that cobwebs will be rolled up and stored for next year and that their cut price skeletons will find a home in an op shop. Yet behind all the friskiness and ‘scariness’, oh so spooky, other matters are waiting to meet them. Matters that the calendar in days following has already had in mind long before the frivolous decades of K-Mart craniums. Questions, like what exactly is our relationship to all the living and the dead? Can they be bought? And anyway, what is a saint?

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.