Goodbye Hallowe'en: a past perfect and past present holiday

It is tragic - I must take down my Halloween decorations. Well, I guess not must, but should probably. I do love All Hallows Eve, but if I had all the trappings of it hanging around all year it just wouldn't be as special and fun.

My morbid yard, alas, must return to normal

Halloween was off limits when I was a kid. Because my mother had dabbled in what she called witchcraft when she was a teenager, when she began going to church with her grandmother - the only religious person in my mother's family - she gave up the usual things it is said you must give up when you become a Christian, including Halloween. So, naturally, as her children, we were allowed to dress up (mainly as Bible or history characters) and go to the church fall festivals, but never trick-or-treating. 

It never bothered me really, until I was a teenager and became interested in all things fantasy - especially elves and fairies - and wanted to dress up and go out with my friends. I was also interested in Celtic and pagan traditions and holidays, which included All Hallows Eve. I had read about Halloween, and even in those tracts from church casting halloween as demonic I found it darkly intriguing and mysterious, something forbidden in earlier years and therefore all the more enticing. 

 More creepy decorations

Now that I have my own life and my own house, I will celebrate Halloween every year. I enjoy the shifts and layers that it has acquired throughout history. Some historians believe it could have originated  in Roman festivals and and feasts of the harvest and the dead, but it is more widely associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an). Deriving from an irish word samuin, meaning end of summer, Samhain was a harvest festival falling an the first day of autumn, and was the most important of the four quarter celebration days in the Irish and Scottish medieval calendar. People also believed that it was a time when the everyday world and the realm of the magical and spiritual were closest. Christians and the Catholic Church also influenced Halloween with their All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, a time for honoring and praying for the souls of the dead. Many would wear masks and other costuming so as to disguise themselves, following lit candles held by others on their way to their place of worship for the next day.

Pumpkins on my table

I think you can disregard what anything has been in the past and accept it for what it is to you now, including Halloween. But, I prefer to keep the doors of history open and, perhaps, the door to the magical realms open as well. Halloween has the qualities of an ancient old town like Dublin, Ireland. Walking down Dublin's streets, you can see a each layer of its long life throughout civilization, from the cobblestones and Dublin Castle of the medieval times, to the many colorful doors of the Georgian era, and hundred-year-old buildings housing cellphone stores. There are aged pubs that still bear the original name from the times of the Irish kings, but show Gaelic foorball games on their flat screens behind the bar. 

Worlds and ages meet and commune on one night, Hallowe'en. 

So, to celebrate it this year, I had my first Halloween party. This is mainly why I spent so much time on decorating. It was largely a success, except for the part where my high school girl-crush walked in (whom I invited but hadn't seen since, well, high school, during which I was much too shy to talk to her) and I am sure that at that moment I was probably the most awkward person she had ever talked to. (Hi Anne, glad I got the awkwardness over with). I managed to get a few pictures of the costumes. Oh, and I'm a new Instagram user due to my sister persuading me to sign up, so the pictures are all at least 45% hipper than their original form (not an official percentage, I just made it up). 

 A Paul Bunyan and Blue Ox, a Margaret Tennenbaum (my sister), a Christmas sweater couple, and a best friends heart.

I was a Victorian ghost, and my husband Daniel was a John "Hannibal" Smith from the A-Team.

Hell yeah. 'Til next time.