Why we need Halloween

On death and levity

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This morning, before anyone else was up, I crept around downstairs and decorated the house. We have a special box for it now, brought down from the loft: nylon cobwebs, bat bunting, and strings of lights like dislodged eyeballs. A hundred battery-operated tealights, which I dotted onto every shelf and corner. Then there were the pumpkins of course, carved earlier in the week, but lit from the inside to greet the day. When my son came downstairs, he gasped. I grinned from the kitchen doorway. 

I never thought I’d allow this outbreak of kitsch in my own house, but here we are. It’s one of the many surrenders I’m glad to have made as I get older and less absolute in my beliefs. Bert loves Halloween, and now so do I; I believe him when he says it’s better than Christmas. For breakfast, I made pancakes shaped like toadstools, the batter for their caps dyed red. Tonight, for dinner, there will be a feast of ghoulish foodstuffs, hotdogs wrapped in mummy bandages, rice krispie brains and bright green mac and cheese. We will sing along to Monster Mash, attempt the dance of Thriller, and inevitably watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, pausing only to hand out sweets to the small children who come to the door. 

Last year’s Halloween banquet

But I will also spend some time in front of my altar, a candle lit, feeling the heaviness of the world. At the moment, there is a photograph of my grandparents propped behind it. It was taken in the 1950s, and glimpses the two of them through the doors of the family beach hut. My grandad has his back to the camera; he’s sitting on a bench and eating. My grandma, holding a plate, is looking straight at us. She has been surprised by the camera, and hasn’t thought to smile; instead, we see her just as she was in everyday life. Her face is so much like mine. It never struck me before today that it is a little uncanny to have someone engage with you so directly through time, to see your own face in someone else’s, to find what is lost frozen in a photograph. 

This is the counterpoint to the lurid Halloween that we buy from supermarket shelves, a bass note in a jangling day. We can hold both, I think: the silliness and the sombre. One is the gateway to the other; one is a gateway out. I couldn’t tell you which is which. The way that levity has overtaken Halloween is its own kind of truth. In an age where death has been ejected from the everyday, our children have found their own, fumbling way to befriend it. 

We adults, meanwhile, feel as though we are holding back a flood of death that draws ever closer. We say that at Samhain the veil grows thin, and we start to perceive the otherworld, but this feels like the age of the thin veil, the merging of life and death stretching over months and years. Perhaps we conjured it by our witnessing. The distances of the world were gathered like pulled threads, and we suddenly started to see what had always been there, but hidden: the endless apocalypse that rolls around the world like a swollen tide. 

The question is not how we draw back that veil, and hide the glut of human cruelty and catastrophe again. The question, instead, is how we can allow ourselves to sit with it, to perceive it, to feel our own helplessness and to find our agency within all this fate. It seems to me that Halloween is an invitation to do that, and a chance to remember it as a sequence of days, as our ancestors did. Halloween - All Hallows’ Eve - is part of Allhallowtide. We are invited to contemplate darkness on the night before All Saints’ Day, which is surely a day to remember the good in the world, the people who sacrifice themselves as they rush to help. And then there is All Souls’ Day, when we tend to our more personal dead. Everything we need is encapsulated in these three days, as long as we are prepared to walk the full length of its ceremonial landscape. 

So, let Halloween be a bit of fun; let us leaven the dark nights and make a mockery of evil, even as we feel it encroaching. This is what we are: particles of a greater sentience that is mostly good, but undeniably tainted by horror. Our work is to learn to live with this. We are rarely able to prevent the horror, but still we hold it on our bodies, feel it as our own. Meanwhile, each one of us can tip the balance between goodness, towards light. 

If you want to know what Halloween has become, this is it: a ward against hopelessness; an uprising of the children; a festival of generosity and laughter in a long dark night.

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