Every October

Road Dust and Writing Signs Post #6

Every October, it’s the same: Halloween decorations abound. I can’t remember when the first stores devoted to Halloween opened up around the country, and I don’t know which came first: the stores or Halloween’s popularity. Soon, the holiday almost overshadowed Christmas and relegated Thanksgiving to that November day celebrated with shopping and football.

My daughters thrill in the Halloween season even into their middle adulthood. I stand alone in viewing Trick or Treat, haunted houses, corn mazes, and pumpkin carving as a big whoop. For me, the modern version of Halloween doesn’t hold a candle to its origins.

For instance, Mexico’s Day of the Dead embraces the inevitability of death by honoring deceased family members. They create ofrendas, or family altars, in their homes and decorate them with photos of loved ones, their favorite foods, flowers, and candles. They also gather at the cemetery to clean family graves and place new flowers there (much like we do on Memorial Day).

A celebrated figure, La Catrina, a female skeleton wearing a boa and fancy Victorian hat, parades down the street - a reminder that death comes for all, rich and poor alike. Many join La Catrina in celebration by painting their faces to resemble skeletons. The holiday began with the Aztecs and Toltecs some thousand years ago, born from the belief that once a year, the spirits of the dead return to their communities.

Americans adopted a watered-down version of Halloween from the Celtic festival, Samhain. The Celts, too, believed the spirits of the dead walked the earth once a year when the boundary between the living world and the underworld blurred. Bonfires were lit, in part, to ward off the spirits, but also as a sacred ritual commemorating the importance of fire for the coming winter months. The Celts wore costumes and animal heads as part of the ritual. It’s almost amusing to think the cute costumes worn today for a holiday celebrating candy is related to Samhain.

I’ll put my disdain aside in view of my multiple visits to cemeteries this past summer, including the graves of my ancestors (see post #4). I’ll end my nod to Halloween with a shout-out to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, a lovely place where I visited the graves of Louisa May Alcott and family, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The cemetery sits on a steep hill in town and is quite crowded, but I suppose the dead don’t mind.

Happy Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, Día de los Muertos, Samhain, or anything you do that’s cool in October!

See you down the road, Joy