Death Needs a Holiday

Look in your family photo album and what do you find? Pictures of graduations, birthday parties, weddings and vacations. Photos taken during holidays celebrating the new life of spring, the return of the sun in mid-winter, fruits of the harvest.

Everyone is smiling, no matter how much tension lurks behind the pleasant façade. Where are the images of break-ups, divorces, illnesses, and funerals? These events shape us as much as, perhaps more than, the happier moments. But we hide them away, preferring a story that life is all about joy.

That's why Halloween is so important: it is the only holiday that commemorates death, offering us a rare opportunity to face the darkness. Not the darkness of violence or evil, but the darkness that is part of the natural cycle: a chance to accept endings, to mourn losses and to recognize our mortality.

A century ago, most people died at home and were laid out in the front parlor. But now death is something we rarely witness, except the violent deaths depicted on TV shows, in films and in crime novels. As a society, we cling to the myth of perpetual summer, constant growth in the economy, and continuous improvement in our personal lives. So when things go wrong, when we make mistakes, when we lose someone dear to us, we see that as abnormal.

We confuse darkness with evil, and approach death with fear, thus the emphasis in American celebrations of Halloween on demons and ghosts, the gory and the grotesque.Yet death is as natural as life.

All cultures have a holiday when the dead are honored--in fact, most have more than one: In Japan, the Obon festival in July; in China, the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts; in ancient Rome, the ghosts of the ancestors were appeased during Lemuria on May 9.

Today in America, we still have the secular holidays of Memorial Day and Veteran's Day. But during my childhood, those perfunctory trips to the cemetery to lay flowers on my grandfather's grave never caught my imagination the way Halloween did, and still does. Underneath the disguises, trick-or-treating and parties, the spiritual heart of the holiday is an acknowledgement of death.

Halloween is a complex blend of customs from many different cultures and holidays. The oldest layer comes from the Celtic festival of Samhain, which means "summer's end." It was also the new year--the Celts believed the year began in darkness, just as the day began at dusk. It was a time when the crack between this world and the Other World was open. Fires were left burning during the night and people avoided walking in isolated places, for fear the fairies would take them away. In Ireland, the whole month of November is devoted to the dead, who hold their final dance on November 30.

In the seventh century, the Catholic Church established a holy day honoring All Saints. At first celebrated in May (when the Romans held their feast of the dead), it was later moved to November 1. Also known as All Hallows Day, it's the source of the name Halloween (the eve of Hallows). By the 10th century, the following day, November 2, was officially designated as All Souls Day, when the faithful pray for the souls of their departed.

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