Halloween As An Endangered Holiday?!

Here is a blog from the King Of Halloween. that I wanted to share with everyone that I thought you might find interesting. This is also an article that I submitted to some newspapers as well, let me know what you think.
I'm not quite sure when it happened, but Halloween can now officially be listed as an "endangered holiday." It has three strikes against it: it's no longer politically correct, it involves children, and it deals with death. American paranoia has never been higher regarding all three issues, and in our panic to sanitize society, we're about to do a grave injustice to a carnival that is not only a hell of a lot of fun, but provides several important cultural services. Now, Halloween has always involved death, and has long involved children, but I must confess to being particularly clueless as to when, exactly, people started to find it offensive. This didn't seem to be the case back in the '70s, I know that much. Sure, we had stories about razor blades in apples and poisoned candy, and all that, but it was mostly just urban legends to lend some "real danger" to the whole thing. It certainly did nothing to spoil my fun in dressing up like a witch and filling a pillowcase with enough candy to make the sugar orgy last until Thanksgiving. Somewhere in my teens I became aware that some "uptight" people were complaining that the holiday was somehow a tribute to pagans, but I figured people would just ignore such talk. There's a huge difference, after all, between dressing up like a witch for fun and actually paying tribute to witches. But, quite the contrary, anti-Halloween-costume sentiment has grown to alarming proportions, and now we have grammar schools that ban ghost and vampire costumes and churches that hold tea parties on Halloween night to "compete with the infidels." This is much more than just a shame. This is a sign of a culture that is losing its ability to understand irony or see beyond the literal. This is a sign that American culture is in trouble. One of the greatest challenges to a society is its creation of a method to cope with death. Death is that great unknown, the taboo that undoes all laws and pays no attention to social divisions. It is the great equalizer and the ultimate undoing of all worldly vanity. In response, many cultures become obsessed with death. The ancient Egyptians are an obvious example, with their elaborate tombs and embalming techniques and rituals for acquiring social status and wealth even after death. For them, death could be conquered and transcended by those select few on Earth with enough money and power, yet one has to wonder if even the most devoted Egyptian mummy-maker didn't doubt whether they were truly going to be set up with their promised condo and couch in the afterlife. Other cultures avoid death-obsessions, but still use death as an important cultural motivation. The Spartans saw death as a challenge. A good death occurred in courageous battle, a bad one did not serve one's country. Because they lived to die honorably, their culture valued a "Spartan" lifestyle: simple, manly, direct, unadorned and ready for life's glorious end. Many cultures see death as but a doorway to the next life, a reflection of one's deeds in this life, directed by one's karma. This has led, in various societies, to a worshipping of cattle, the great devaluation or equally great veneration of people's lives, religious figures so pure inside that they bleed milk instead of blood, meditative chanting, monastic isolation, and other cultural extremes. Other cultures have used death as a way to bribe the gods, sending animal and human sacrifices up to say a good word in some god's ear. Others use it as a bribe for the people: be good (and do as I say) in this life and you'll be rewarded in heaven. Death is the origin of our deepest fears. As a source of such great power, death is the foundation for virtually any culture's two most powerful aspects: law and religion. Law's ultimate punishment is death, and religion's ultimate focus is the role of death in life and in the afterlife. People who worry about "what Halloween is doing to our children" aren't wrong to assume the stakes are high. What they're not seeing is that Halloween's main purpose is not to celebrate or enhance death's power. It rather serves -- and this is an extremely valuable service indeed! -- to weaken it.  A casual survey of Halloween's origins will reveal that those origins are in dispute. Yes, some aspects of America's Halloween tradition come from the ancient Celts, who thought that demons roamed the Earth and thus left out "treats" to keep the demons away. Yes, the Catholic Church took over this pagan rite (as it did so many others) and based it on a sort of "All Hallow's Eve" (or All Saints Day). Yes, playing "tricks" to imitate demons seems to be part of several cultures' ancient rituals. But in point of fact, the origins of this ancient/pagan/Catholic holiday are not really important. They have little to do with the modern American celebration of letting kids dress up in costumes and roam the neighborhood looking for candy or doing a little (harmless, one hopes) vandalism to mark a scary night. This version of the holiday is a carnival, parody of pagan rites, done in the spirit not of devil-worship, but in fun. It's a sort of cultural nose-thumbing at death and spooks, an acceptance of our historical fears of Things That Go Bump in the Night and, at the same time, a disempowering of such fears by allowing our children -- without fear -- to parade around in debunked finery. Halloween has served for many decades now as a sort of cultural reality-check, a party that reminds us not to get obsessed with death or gather superstitions for warding off evil. Modern Halloween traditions are based on a firm belief that spooks and goblins and (medieval-style) witches and vampires aren't going to hurt us, that instead they are sources of imagination and fun. In this manner, Halloween provides an essential function. It is one of the few times that our social and fantasy lives are allowed to mingle. As such, I learned that fantasy, even dark fantasies, are common and harmless as long as one obeys the rules. Society in turn rewarded me for my lessons with bags of candy and other possibilities for play-acting. The entire purpose of carnival is to turn things upside down, to deflate the power of authorities and to celebrate the human spirit of irreverence. If, instead, our society had taught us as children that our desire to be a witch or other dark creatures was based on some desire to worship the devil, if we had been beaten or shunned until the evil spirit within us was destroyed, I think we would have been severely messed up. Eventually, we would either have to hate a society that punished us for harmless fun, or hate ourselves in the belief that we had, in fact, been practicing evil. This corrosive alternative is precisely what we are threatening our children with by calling Halloween bad names. When a school bans ghost and goblin costumes, it empowers those costumes -- and makes them much more desirable -- by telling children that such costumes have real power. They turn something that was approached as a parody and a game and turn it into something real and dangerous. All the good of modern Halloween's carnival spirit in debunking pagan superstitions and reminding us not to fear our goblins of old will be lost if we force our children to take their play seriously. Which is all to say that a ghost costume only has power if we give it power, and the best way to give something power is to fear it, ban it, suppress it, or label it "evil." And so I would ask the Halloween-hating parents out there to take a lesson from us halloween fans. Someone dressed as Darth Vader at a convention isn't trying to summon the Dark Side of the Force or corrupt others into becoming servants of evil. A guy in a Klingon warrior outfit doesn't wish he could chop your head off. Those teenagers dressed as Borg don't wish to become soulless automatons -- quite the opposite, I should think. Villains' costumes are fun in great part because they "tear down the fort." If you can take the biggest, baddest thing you know, put on its clothes, and then boogie the night away, you have conquered that big bad, deflated its evil trappings by making them look silly, and survived the ordeal quite intact, thank you very much. No wonder best-selling Halloween masks of late include not just Freddy Kruger and Jason, but also Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. After all, if you dress up like a ballerina for Halloween, all you get to do is twinkle your toes. Let us not, then, in our quest to keep our children safe, rob them of an important way to deal with fear. We cannot grow if we don't learn about death and its attendant darkness. Forbidding our children from playing with old superstitions does nothing but teach them that our demon folklore is just as powerful as ever, and that pointed hats and vampire fangs are filled with powerful magic after all. Instead, put on your most ghoulish outfit, let blood drip from your wax lips and horns pop out from your hairdo while you lisp your way through "I vant to suck your blood!" and wiggle your way through "The Time Warp." The children (and adults) around you will scream with laughter, not fear, and that's the lesson we all need to learn, now more than ever.