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Here’s the thing about Halloween: all year long if you live in America you’re under a steady assault by this right-wing traditional faux-wholesome pseudo-Christian nuclear patriot family atmosphere, and then all the sudden as the weather cools and the days shorten the country loses its marbles decking everything out in bloody corpses, demon faces, witchcraft and giant rubber bugs. Half the country thinks they’re the Addams Family for 1-3 months while a small chunk of weiners get angry that it’s “pagan” or something.
I don’t know if anyone in any other cultural environment can really understand how that feels. It’s the antithesis of the “love jesus and eagles or GIT OUT” under(over)tone American culture is usually about.
And even though it generates billions of dollars, there’s no pressure, shaming or guilting to spend money on it like there is for certain other holidays. We spend that much on Halloween just because it’s fun and we want to, rather than some unspoken (usually unspoken) rule that you must buy extravagant gifts or you’re a heathen scrooge and you don’t love your family.
and it’s when everything is themed with black and it’s totally acceptable
This is actually one of the original purposes of Halloween.
Halloween, like Mardi Gras, descends from the inversion festival. Inversion festivals were a necessary part of most highly regimented and class-divided ancient cultures, such as Rome. You spent all year keeping rigidly to your class and policing others to do the same, living a life of very public behaviors, worshipping very specifically and obeying societal laws you may not agree with and which may not be to your benefit.
But ah, then the festival time came. The rules were thrown out. Sometimes the classes were literally inverted and the nobility were forced to serve. Nothing was taboo. The macabre, the ugly, the things that violated all laws of polite society were glorified. For a period of time – often longer in proportion to how regimented your society was – you were free to do and be exactly what you wanted. You could wear a costume. You could hide from the world behind a mask. You could make all the noise you wanted and nobody would stop you because it was driving out the evil in the community (the evil often being the stress of living in a very outward-facing, regimented society).
And America, whatever anyone says, is an incredibly regimented and class-oriented society. So our lead-in to Halloween is two months long.
Halloween is one of America’s only true inversion festivals. Christmas has terribly rigid expectations and heaps of stress, Thanksgiving makes you want to kill your whole family, the fourth of July it’s too fuckin’ hot, St. Patrick’s Day is too short and it’s filled with douchebags. Memorial Day is for mourning, Labor Day you’re about to start school again. Mardi Gras is a great, very historic inversion festival, but it’s also fairly localized. Pride comes close, and is a very badly needed form of inversion festival for its participants, but it’s not universal and it also involves aspects of activism and protest which use inversion but are not part of inversion.
Halloween is it. It’s our national cut-loose party. And that’s not accidental. Halloween has been an inversion festival since before it had that name, since ancient people realized the harvest was over, the dark short days were coming, and everyone was gonna have to spend the next four months indoors trying not to murder one another.
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
You pass by the man on the street who greets you every morning, each day a foot closer to your house. He’s only a block away now.
The orchard up the road does not grow fruit. It grows fruit bats, and they’re ready for harvest.
Your last class of the day does not have a teacher, a curriculum, windows, or even desks. Just an empty room where 25 people gather at the end of the day and stare blankly at a white board. Until one day, there is a single book in the room.
You’ve never been good at ceramics, you’ve told yourself this. But finding body parts in your pieces after they’ve been fired is usually a call for a failing grade.
The metal detector at the airport goes off when you walk through, even though you’re 100% sure you have not metal on you. Then they run your x-ray.
Cats have always followed you. Into stores, into your house, into businesses. But they’re really following what follows you.
Adriellyn's Wandering Home 