I Love Halloween

GREAT costumes!

I think the first time I celebrated Halloween, I was three. We didn't go trick or treating, but my parents dressed me up as Cinderella, pre-makeover, in an apron and a handkerchief in my hair. There's a picture of me, taking a break from my job of doling out candy to our neighbors, a job I took VERY seriously, spinning around at the foot of our banister, grinning widely. I might have even been holding a wooden spoon to add to the verisimilitude of my costume. Props help me get into character.

I never realized we have the same "Bitch, please" face

The next Halloween, I was Cinderella again, this time post visit from Fairy Godmother. My mom made my dress, and it was EPIC. I spent all day arranging the skirt around me as I sat in the Circle with my classmates and heroically did NOT play on the playground. I'm sure there's all kind of dispute about what you ACTUALLY remember from your formative years, but I don't care about it, and I can tell you I felt like a PRINCESS in that dress.

Not even close. When I find that picture of me as Cinderella, you guys are going to be like "ZOMG"

Another year I was a dalmation, a costume my mom also made, out of a white sweat suit and black felt dots. I remember my friend Crystal was going to go trick or treating with me and said she was going to wear her Little Mermaid costume that her grandmother had made her, but my dad would have to carry her. I not so kindly informed him that if my dad was going to carry anyone door to door around the "nice" neighborhoods asking for candy, it was going to be ME. She did not wear her Little Mermaid costume. One year, the WORST year, I bought a strange vinyl Snow White costume that came with a plastic mask with the eyes cut out. I have no idea what possessed me that year, as I hate masks and Snow White. But I suppose it's hard to account for the whims of 6 year olds sometimes.

...

Then, my church started having a Harvest Festival, because my non-denominational church learned that Halloween had ties to Satanists and that some people probably used Ouiji boards on Halloween to contact the dead and later on become witches and coven leaders with crows for pets, or changed their hair color willy-nilly. I don't know how they learned this, because it was in the 90s and no one had the internet back then. I have to assume it was via propaganda from Focus on the Family. Gone were the days of dressing up as Disney characters; no more candy-begging. My beautiful Cinderella costume would never see the light of day again, because it was too much like godless heathens and if I wore it on Halloween, it would probably mean that I was going to become a minion of the devil.

Oh my god how close was I to having those eyebrows??

I would call my mom for clarification, but she's getting her nails done, so I'm going to have to go off of what I've seen people talk about lately as a basis for this interruption in my Halloween celebration. Apparently a lot of people who are decrying Halloween allege that the holiday has ties to the way, very old (like 500-ish BC) Celtic celebration of Samhain, which is not pronounced at all like how you think it should be. It's Sow - like "cow" -en.  So anyway, let me tell you all about Samhain, which I learned about on Wikipedia, which makes me at least as qualified to speak on it as anyone else on the internet. Samhain was a huge end of summer celebration on November 1, but even back then people liked to get the party started early. Festivities kicked off with bringing the cattle in from the summer pasture and slaughtering livestock for the coming winter. It also involved animal sacrifice, and it's possible that people went door to door, collecting food for feasts. And it wouldn't be a party with a little libation, and people wore awesome costumes, paying homage to gods and deities, to symbolize the release of the dead from the Otherworld, and to confuse the unwelcome spirits. I like to picture the Celts pre-gaming with mead or whatever, getting their costumes all ready, and basically just trying to skip the animal sacrifices. I assume actual Samhain was celebrated by canning all the fruits of the harvest and people glaring at each other through their Samhain hangovers.

I'm no historian, but this is what I'm picturing

So, based on my limited research, Samhain was totally a thing, and was celebrated in much the same way we still celebrate things - eating, drinking, and wearing cool clothes.

THEN, the Christians/Catholics stuck their noses in. In 609 AD, Christians started celebrating All Saints' Day/All Hallows, which was when people honored saints and prayed for the recently deceased who were not yet in Heaven, and were instead possibly wandering around the neighborhood. Originally, All Saints' Day/All Hallows was on May 13, but then Pope Gregory IV had a great marketing idea to switch up the calendar a little so that Christian holidays coincided a little closer with pagan ones, hoping to spread the Catholic-demographic a little wider. All Saints' Day became November 1, and by the end of the 12th Century, All Hallows Eve, on October 31, was celebrated by poor people collecting "soul cakes" door-to-door, and wearing costumes to hide from malevolent spirits. The Irish and Scottish brought it with them during their mass immigration to the United States during the 19th Century, but it wasn't until the 20th century that it became a national night to dress up as a zombie Kardashian. Or the Mario Brothers.

The idea, though, that someone's idea of fun, which consists of candy, costumes, and wandering around with your friends, might have roots (very, very, old roots) in something that was weird like Samhain, is unbearable to certain groups of people. So there were a few years of my childhood where I didn't go trick or treating with kids from school. Instead, I went to my church's Harvest Festival, where we dressed up as prairie and farm characters and bobbed for apples, and got candy without asking. Conveniently, Harvest Festival fell on the same weekend other Americans were celebrating the "Satanist" and "pagan" Halloween. Handy!

Honestly, I have really fun memories of Harvest Festival. At that age, I was strangely preoccupied with all things antique and Little House on the Prairie. I was also a fierce competitor at bobbing for apples. SIDE NOTE! So bobbing for apples is actually based on the belief that the apple can be used for divination? In one version, the first person to bite an apple would be the first person to marry; in another version I found, the apple you bit into would be peeled, and then you would throw the peel over your shoulder, and the shape the peel fell into was the initial of your true love! Romantic! We had a hayride behind a truck and danced to country music. There were probably a lot of bales of straw. But it meant an afternoon hanging out with my friends, eating BBQ, and pretending my friend's sister, who was dressed up as a cow, was an actual cow. I have no complaints about Harvest Festival, except that I'm not sure how much sense it makes to arbitrarily have a celebration of harvest in the hottest desert in the country. When you think about it, isn't celebrating the "harvest" a the same time as Halloween, doing all the same things involved in Halloween just a cop out? It's not so much "being in the world but not part of the world" as it is "doing the same exact thing as everyone else but calling it different name." Logically, it doesn't make sense to me.

Most people generally accept that today's Halloween is likely more connected to All Hallow's than Samhain, but even if it's connected to Samhain, I'm not sure why it's a bad thing. When I read descriptions of Samhain celebrations from Christians who view Halloween as inherently evil, I notice a lot of pearl-clutching over the fact that there were animal sacrifices and allegations of human sacrifice. As to the animal sacrifice, I really have to wonder how these Christians have forgotten the sacrifices God demanded in the Old Testament, and the whole idea that Jesus was the figurative sacrificial lamb. The Bible has never indicated it has a problem with animal sacrifice. (OBVIOUSLY I don't condone it, but I acknowledge that it happened, it was probably humane, and it was a part of people's cultures and religion, including mine.) As to the human sacrifice, I think that's bullshit, pardon my French. I have never read anything about Celts sacrificing humans, and in my research of Samhain, I found no mention of human sacrifice, as a part of Samhain or otherwise.

Here's what I really don't get though: Samhain started in 520 BC in Ireland. You know who the Celts probably weren't really talking to that frequently? Daniel. Jeremiah. Haggai. They probably did not know all the rules they were supposed to be following or that they weren't supposed to have more than one god. I think it's been pretty well established that back then they didn't have email. Or blogs. Or a printing press. And even if they did have some writings, they didn't have Google Translate. But somehow we look at all these old practices as people disobeying God's commands and generally being "evil" because it isn't the way WE think you should act. Maybe if the Celts had been God's chosen people, they would have done everything exactly the way God said and they would be in the promised land (I have a LOT easier time seeing Ireland as the Promised Land than icky Jerusalem) with no problems. But they didn't have all those prophets and people with a direct line to God. So they made up their own hobbies.

A lot of cultures were separated from the Old Testament teachings so many Christians think they should have been following all along by distance and language. I wonder how these Christians think they would have lived if they never had a Bible. Do you think you would inherently KNOW about God and what he wanted from you? You would have been just as into the weird costumes and feasts as the next good Celtic chick. Or guy.

Listen, basically up until 50 years ago, people believed some crazy stuff. The Puritans thought they could make a witch cake out of rye meal and urine from "victims" of a witch, feed it to a dog, and the witch would feel it and give herself up. There was even a rule for admitting "spectral evidence" into trial. I mean, my dad told me a few months ago that it didn't matter if you used soap, as long as you have hot water. Basically, people are strange and have always done strange things. I don't know what it is about the Celts and Druids, but I feel like no matter what they did, it's portrayed as "satanic." (By the way, druids did not even have a purely evil spirit like Satan.) (And yes, my dad got himself taken off dish washing duty.)

One last point, if you're going to stop celebrating Halloween because it could be connected to Samhain, you're also going to have to quit Christmas, or should I say... Saturnalia!!! Rape, murder, and going door to door singing songs in the buff? Sounds like good family fun to me!

Basically, if you want to eschew treats, costumes, and Hocus Pocus for... whatever.. more power to you. Personally, I think being scared is fun, sometimes! If you don't that's okay, but please, don't try to tell me my one night of drinking spiked cider, eating candy, and carving the heck out a pumpkin is evil. I'll have to suck the life out of you so I can live forever, beautifully. (That's how witches work, right? That's what Halloween movies taught me.)

(I really hope you guys hovered over the pics. It took me half an hour to do those.)

Of course.

For the past month, I've been doing Camp NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of June. I was pretty good about it, especially considering long hours and busy-ness at both offices, but there were a few days when I didn't write or didn't write as much as I needed to (it averages out to 1667 words a day to reach the goal; my average was more like 1450). With 12 and a half hours left in the month, I have 7,700 words left. So of course I am blogging.

LOL, my poor blog.

SO. Remember how I was going to update this thing regularly? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, best of intentions, bout of depression, etc. So I didn't. And then I got a job (two, actually!) and updating my blog seemed a lot less important? And I didn't really have very much to say?

Guess what, I still don't. BUT! I have this idea. Tell me if you like it.

First, some background:

I was born and before I was 3 I had memorized (and performed for my stuffed animals) "Big Bird Goes to the Doctor." Years later I was the kid walking down the street, riding in the car, waiting for the elevator with my nose stuck in a book. Fast forward some years and I graduated from college with a degree in Literature. I guess you can say reading has been a serious part of my life for a very long time. Getting my degree in Literature meant I read a lot of Serious Books. Books about the world and small people in it, books about ideas and thoughts, books about people who write about the world and the small people and ideas and thoughts. Even when I was assigned to read "Moby Dick" in two weeks, I read unassigned books on the side. A lot of Flannery O'Connor and Salinger, mostly, but also, for example, Ayn Rand (I can with strict authority that, except for a small handful of dictators, she is the worst person ever born). Then I went to law school and read a lot of other things, and I instead of waving "Catcher In the Rye" in front of everybody's face (I don't care what you say, it is THE American novel; in your face, "Grapes of Wrath"), I ranked my favorite Supreme Court Justices and quoted seminal cases. (I know, I was so annoying.) But the thing I didn't do was read "for fun" anymore. (Sidenote: why do people say "for fun" like assigned reading can't be fun? I was assigned books I would never have otherwise read and I count them now amongst my favorites. Reading should always be fun! It puts the "fun" in "fundamental"!) Anyway, it took a couple of years before I had time to read anything that wasn't assigned, and when I did, I started with my old favorites. Dusted off the Flannery, broke out the Shirley Jackson, and even thumbed through "Frankenstein." But something was missing. I still loved, and love, the classics and the things they put in anthologies (just writing that word, I remember my first time buying my book list for my first semester in undergrad and how studious and RIGHT I felt buying those huge collections OHMYGOD I MISS COLLEGE). I wanted something new, and to me, the thing that was truly new, the thing I had missed out on when I was reading Thomas Hardy and "The Good Earth" in high school was young adult fiction. First, it was "The Hunger Games," which I read before I knew everybody in the first-world was reading and that they were making into a movie. Then it was "Divergent," and then "I Am Number Four" and then the entire "Harry Potter" series. Then I took a break and read a whole bunch of Bronte novels.

When I went back to YA, and at some point, I read the first four books in "The Mortal Instruments" series, followed by its prequel, "The Infernal Devices." At this point I almost stopped reading YA fiction. Because it was really bad. It was my first lesson in not trusting all the stars and reviews on Amazon, which should be obvious, because look at the documented evidence of how many people love the "Twilight" series. But these series, by Cassandra Clare, have a lot of followers across the internet, possibly because she got her start by writing Harry Potter fanfiction, which is totally fine and awesome for her, but also, her writing is so amateur and her characters so trite that I don't understand the adoration. Because I hate myself, I also follow her on Twitter, and obviously the things she retweets are going to be self-serving, but it just filled my (kind of writing a novel, sort of, and also teaching myself plotting at the same time) mind with resentment. And just seeing all the self-flagellation makes me want to be a crazy dissenter.I realize that this sounds like I am just bitter and want to bitch about it. And that's kind of true. But this blog also needs direction, and I think it would be fun to try my hand at book reviews. (If you remember, I have reviewed a book before, and I am never doing it in a forum like Amazon ever again.) I am pretty good at analyzing literature in the sense of discussing themes and metaphors and fancy stuff, but when you're a lit student, you don't really discuss whether something was entertaining or a good read. At least I didn't. I was too wrapped up in churning out papers to worry about whether I "liked" a book. Literature was something you probed and dissected, like a cadaver, and you don't talk about whether you liked the body you autopsied (unless you do, I don't know. I don't watch "CSI".) Looking back, I clearly remember discussing some books more than others, and some books I learned to love through the method of discussion. Turning off the part of your brain that automatically identifies elements of a story and spots epiphanies and different kinds of irony is something else to me, but I think I would like to develop my skills in evaluating a book not just on its anatomy.

So I'm going to start with Book 1 of "TMI" as the kids on the internet say, and I'm going to talk about what I did and don't like about it, and there will probably be some Literaure-ease sprinkled in there, and then we'll go through the books. Yes, this will require that I re-read the series, which will be painful, but I'm willing to do it because I love you guys.

I realize a lot of you don't care about this at all. Totally fine. I won't be offended if you skip. Mostly, I just want to review some stuff I feel strongly about without engaging in a battle over semantics with numb-skulls that pepper Amazon. So, right now I am reading another YA novel I really like so far called "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" and then I'll get on this review thingie. I just wanted to announce it now because otherwise I'm afraid it won't happen. And if the history of my blog writing is any indication, it still might not, but anyway. At least it feels good to update this stupid thing.


Sooooooo... who's excited!