by Kate Keefe Originally published 27 October 2022, The Tablet
Of course it’s autumn, as so many shop windows have the same colour scheme: orange, black and purple, with occasional highlights of bright green. Halloween makes a big splash on the high street nowadays, with every food shop and confectioner offering lurid options meant to be slightly scary (but not really).
There are pictures of witches, pumpkins with grimacing faces, little felt cats and bats, and spiders and skeletons everywhere, some edible. This morning I saw a plastic cauldron with two legs sticking out of it, dressed in stripy stockings.
Every shop is doing it, even haberdashers and locksmiths. The supermarkets are full of it, and their free magazines have recipes galore for making things which are actually revolting, or try to be. Even my youngest daughter looked at a recipe for boiled eggs with “fingers” made of bread with a ketchup fingernail and thought it was horrible. I’m not sure why eyeballs are such a thing this year, but it’s probably something to do with zombies (which I tend to avoid).
A lot of it is imported from America, of course, including the pumpkins, and a lot of it is made in China (not including the pumpkins). The Irish used to make candle-lanterns out of turnips, and I think that the only thing I knew about pumpkins as a child was that your fairy godmother could change one into a coach fit for a princess. Very positive, and not at all like the grinning horror faces we are now being offered.
And pumpkin is really rather boring to eat; I wonder how many people actually eat the bits they carve out of the lanterns? I’d feel bored if I ate it, and guilty if I didn’t.
Every year I see what’s on offer for Halloween and I feel antisocial and misanthropic, because I find it all so depressing. It’s tawdry, it’s ugly, it’s cheap and nasty, and much of the time it’s not even accurate. I saw a black felt cat in a window display today, with a white bib and forepaws, whereas everybody knows that a witch’s cat doesn’t have a single white hair. The cat with all the friendly white bits (paws, bib and tail tip) is Postman Pat’s friend and companion Jess. If you’re going to do popular superstition, at least get it right.
But piggybacking marketing opportunities on something more serious or even religious is something people have been doing for a long time: “tawdry” derives from “St Audrey’s lace”, a neck ornament sold at the fair held on the feast of St Audrey (or Etheldreda), though the cheap and gaudy overtones accrued later. Look too at all the mediaeval trade in fake relics.
I find it difficult to see terror as a good thing. We put the lights on or in the old days kindle fires when it gets dark for a reason. I have heard explanations that it helps children to control their fear if they can experience it in a loving context, but I think they are going to meet plenty of scary things anyway, and I don’t want to frighten them just for the hell of it, as you might say.
You can have witchy parties at any time of year (Rachel had one in the summer for her birthday when she was eight; we had a cauldron of blackcurrant juice with lemonade in it to make it frothy and we put marbles in to be the eyeballs, even then), but this is in the context of witches in fairy stories (Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and so on), rather than witches in the context of graves and darkness. Many children are terrified of what just might be under the bed without any help; whose side are you on?
In a time when most people seem unable to say the word “died” without reaching for a euphemism, it seems odd to spend a period of time either trying to terrify children or tell them there is nothing to fear, because it’s all quite cute really. I don’t want children to have nightmares or be scared out of their wits, but the whole Halloween paraphernalia is totally fake, as we are taking these various frightening things and eviscerating them.
Witches, ghosts and skeletons are supposed to be scary, not cute. Real horror is not funny; fake horror seems foolish. Real fear is not something you should be hoping to inflict on others; fake fear is slightly embarrassing.
My primary objection, though, is that we are selling our children short. Halloween as we see it on offer in Britain today is a poor imitation of what we ought to be telling and showing.
The festival has a very complicated history, with lots of people insisting that it “really” belongs to pagans, or Satanists, or Ancient Celts, or various other groups, including Hollywood horror film makers, and I’m not going to claim that the Church either started or has a unique claim to it. But it coincides with the vigil (hence “e’en” or “eve”) of two mighty feasts which are in danger of being ignored in the rush to trick or treat.
Halloween is the night, specifically after sunset, of 31 October , because 1 November is the feast of All Saints, which used to be called “All Hallows”, meaning the same thing, just as in the Our Father.
I think of this as the most heraldic of the Church’s feasts (my children always snort when I say this), but it’s like a colourful procession of amazing people with banners and trumpets. I particularly like that it is called “All” Saints, because my mental procession is made up of as many women as men, and the name allows for the saints (often female) which the Church hasn’t got around to including yet, as well as the canonical ones who don’t have their own feast day.
The lists of saints in the liturgy are always heavily overweighted with male saints, but my procession is better balanced. The first reading for All Saints describes the assembled throng of the servants of God as “people”, so we start off at least trying to be gender-neutral.
The psalm unfortunately does not manage to continue in this generous and all-encompassing spirit, and the response (in the UK) is “Such are the men who seek your face, O Lord”, though I am pleased to say the other anglophone Lectionaries try a little harder. The Australians and the US have “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face”, and the Canadians have “Lord, this is the company of those who seek your face”, which I particularly like, as bringing in again the heraldic idea. I have to admit that all the efforts to include women come unstuck in the body of the psalm, with those pesky pronouns tripping us up as they do so often.
The saints are a wonderful resource for the Church, and I don’t think we do enough to tell our children the stories. I don’t mean just the pious legends, which can be a bit saccharine, but the fun stories, like St Francis and the Wolf, St Christopher the Holy Giant and the miraculously weight-gaining baby on his back, St Brendan and the voyages, St Columba and the Loch Ness Monster.
Helen Waddell’s Beasts and Saints is a rich source, worth tracking down (it even runs to dragons). I admit you have to work a bit harder to find female equivalents, but I love St Zita, with the angels helpfully getting the bread out of the oven for her, and St Elizabeth of Hungary and her apron full of miraculous roses so that she doesn’t get into trouble over giving too much food away to the poor.
As we get older we learn more about heroic saints in more modern history, which is and should be thrilling, from Edmund Campion (I recommend Evelyn Waugh’s Life) to Oscar Romero. Again, you have to hunt a bit harder for the women, and many aren’t yet official, but their lives are truly inspiring (Julian of Norwich, Hilda of Whitby, Mary Ward, Cornelia Connolly, Mary MacKillop, Edith Stein).
All Saints gives us this wonderful, colourful crew to remember, admire and emulate, with not a pumpkin in sight. The older ones often have props, though, some just as horrific as Halloween ones, if your children long for horror, from Lucy’s eyes on a tray to Bartholomew’s skin draped over his arm. It’s actually really useful to be able to identify the different saints by their props, and something children enjoy learning – I suppose it’s like Scout badges or different makes of car. And they are not all horrific: Peter’s keys or the evangelists’ animals, for example.
So All Saints is worth celebrating, full of the sound of trumpets. Then the next day we have All Souls, because this group of people is only one step behind. This is where the saints become personal; this is for our own family and friends who have died.
It is not a holiday of obligation like All Saints, but for a lot of people, this is definitely a day to go to Mass. That’s because we are celebrating all our own beloved dead, the “absent friends” we toast at Christmas and big family occasions. This is their special day. In many countries they visit family graves on this day. Some even go and picnic there, so as to include the great grandparents or missing sibling in a family occasion. There are three sets of readings for All Souls, partly (I think) in recognition that a lot of priests will be saying a lot of Masses that day.
All Saints and All Souls are both about dead people, like Halloween, but not about horror, fear, revulsion or disgust. All Saints is all about honour and glory, the people for whom the trumpets have already sounded. All Souls is about those closer to us, people we remember and can still pray for, graves we can visit, even though we know they aren’t there.
But we aren’t doing it out of fear or even pretend fear. There are no nodding skeletons, spooktacularly bad puns or creepy creeping hands. It’s about love. I’d rather celebrate that.
© Kate Keefe 2022
