Halloween on Sunday

Scanning the headlines on CNN.com as I do in the mornings, I came across this story, "Halloween on Sunday Troubles Some Southerners." If there is one group of Americans the media loves to bait it is Southerners. Where else can you go for the guilty pleasure of snickering at people poorer and not nearly as smart as yourself?

Think about it. If the History Channel does a documentary on racism in America, what do they do? Invariably, they'll cut scenes from articulate, Julian Bond (Chairman of the NAACP) to an alarming group of tattooed rednecks screaming, "white power!" Another favorite is to cut from an interview with a white collar homosexual couple to a frenetic group of evangelicals waving "God Hates Fags" signs. In either case, it is clear who you would rather have living in your neighborhood.

Sure enough, this article didn't disappoint. It begins with this classic:

"It's a day for the good Lord, not for the devil," said Barbara Braswell, who plans to send her 4-year-old granddaughter Maliyah out trick-or-treating in a princess costume on Saturday instead.

Apparently, the good Lord doesn't mind if you celebrate the devil on Saturdays.

I expect over the next couple of weeks we'll be hearing more of this sort of thing. And, really, even though all a person would have to do to become a virtual authority on the history of Halloween is do a Google search on "history of halloween" and spend 15-20 minutes reading, wanton ignorance is so much more fun! It is obvious Ms. Braswell isn't aware that "Halloween" is a shortened form of "All Hallow's Eve" the day before All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day, both -wait for it- Christian holidays.

Yep, much like Saturnalia, Yule, and the celebration of the sun god Mithra/Sol, got incorporated into early Christianity as the Christ Mass -Christmas- (fourth century), Samhain and Feralia got incorporated as the Hallow Mass -Hallowmas- (eight century). Sadly, the Hallowmas didn't capture people's imagination the way Christmas did (though even it didn't enjoy widespread celebration until the late 1700's). In fact, it was pretty much a dead holiday until the Victorians developed an interest in the Druids.

In the late 1800's, Americans took the initiative and specifically reintroduced Halloween as a fall festival and kid's holiday (continental Europeans still don't bother with it, and the Brits have Guy Fawks Day, instead). Over a period of half a century, Halloween became costumes, ghosts, goblins, witches, black cats, candy, and trick or treating. By the 1950's, it had become a fun, kid-oriented holiday celebrated by entire communities, public schools, even churches.

So when did the devil get ahold of Halloween? Well, you have to go all the way back to the 1980's. In the early 80's something frightening, almost hysterical, happened. In the Northeast, parents whose kids went to a particular daycare center thought, maybe, their kids were being abused. They grilled the kids with questions and discovered that in addition to sexual abuse, they had also witnessed animal and human sacrifices. No evidence was ever uncovered to substantiate any of it, but it was so sensational that it made national news for weeks. Guess what happened?

As it turns out, alarmed parents from all over the country started asking their kids about what happened at their daycare. To everyone's, including law enforcement's, amazement, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, sexual abuse, and satanic ritual -suspiciously like that found in a Peter Cushing film-, were happening all over the United States. By the mid-80's, the idea of a massive, underground, satanic cult had spread. The Church of Satan, which no one had taken seriously since its creation in 1969, had become famous overnight and wasn't about to let go of the limelight. Convicted murderers discovered that they could become famous by saying, "the devil made me do it". On at least one occasion, a former "high priest" in the Church of Satan made a fortune on the evangelical circuit telling congregations lurid details about things that, as it turned out, never happened.

It was during this hypersensitive period where you had best bring your cat in for fear the local Satanist would get it, that Halloween became the devil's holiday. Even after the FBI ended its decade-long investigation into the underground cult in the early 1990's, admitting that in all that time they had never encountered one single, solitary bit of evidence to support its existence, the notion still persists among a vocal group of believers.

Well, there you have it. The Halloween we group up with really only lasted for about a hundred years. Mebbe it wasn't meant to be...