For the Celtic people who inhabited Ireland, the UK, and Northern France over 2000 years ago what we now know as Halloween was called the Samhain festival. This festival rang in their new year, which began on Nov. 1. Their new year began with the end of the harvest and they believed on that day the barrier between the worlds of living and dead was thinned allowing spirits to easily pass through. This event carried an expectation of not only the evening but of things to come.
The Celtic people practiced these rituals with an expectation of a certain outcome. They believed themselves especially vulnerable to the whims of the spirit world on this night and they sacrificed crops and animals to the deities in bon-fires to assure protection from the gods for the night and the coming winter. The rituals for them were not so much a celebration or party for fun but one that would ellicit certain guarantees.. There was a collective expectation among the group members for participating in these activities.
As a child I wasn’t concerned with the origins of Halloween or why we celebrated. I accepted it and was happy tramping door to door collecting goodies. At the end of the evening my two sisters and I would retreat to our rooms with our bulging plastic shopping bags to take inventory of our stock. This meant separating the good(chocolate) from the bad(anything else) and hiding a fair amount from both piles from our mother before she appeared and commanded us to ready ourselves for bed before taking our treats to the kitchen.
As a child I dressed up in costume because it was a tradition introduced and carried out by my parents. It was something that I didn’t question. I just did it and it was expected that it would generate fun.
Though nothing extraordinary ever happened on the day it was always a day that carried that expectation of fun with it. Halloween was marketed by not only the business world but also by my parents, and the schools as an event that I should positively anticipate. It was a day that was going to be fun. It was going to be fun because there were these rituals in place to create fun.
It would seem that if people go through all the trouble of planning parties, picking out costumes, and spending money on Halloween paraphenelia to fulfill this expectation of fun the effort should at least yield a few outstanding memories.
Yet I searched my memory bank, which I disappointingly discovered has very limited storage space, and didn’t retrieve one single even remotely interesting Halloween. What does that tell you? I’ve experienced many days that I woke up expecting to be “normal” and had incredible experiences. Maybe I should’ve written about one of them.
Christy McKinnon can be contacted at [email protected].