Hallowe’en: Our Celebration of Time’s Passing
These mid-autumn days sing a siren song. The blazing trees, the ticklish breezes, the sunbaked smell of Concord grapes, wraithful mists and the Harvest Moon break open human hearts like pumpkin shells.
This morning’s pastel sunrise shimmering on the spread satin of the Chesapeake summoned me as strongly as love.
It’s no accident, I think, that we celebrate Hallowe’en this time of year.
For this loveliest time of year, when our cups are the fullest, plunges us into the season of loss. Thanks to the blessing of memory, we know worse times are coming. But we’re not there yet.
Autumn, like spring, wants poetry, and long-remembered verses return to help me interpret my heartfulness. It’s not only leaves and tomatoes that will be leaving — all in such a blaze of glory that we love them better than ever since they were new this loveliest of seasons. We’re thinking ahead.
As Shakespeare said: We “love that well which [we] must leave e’re long.”
In the season of Hallowe’en, we’re in touch with two worlds.
Hallowe’en, you’ll remember, is short for All Hallows’ Eve. October 31 is the eve of a big celebration in the Catholic calendar. The next day, November 1, believers pay special attention to all the saints (or hallowed ones) who’ve gone to heaven before them. That’s All Saints’ Day, which in turn is the eve of November 2, All Souls’ Day, when all the dear departed whose addresses we’re not so sure about get their share of prayers.
As we celebrate the year’s bounty, our thoughts are on the dead. Perhaps their thoughts are on us. Perhaps not. It may be only our mood, provoked by the bone-deep knowledge that autumn’s abundance is not about to last. The beautiful, blazing leaves are about to burn out. They’ll fall, and our gardens will wither, and the sun will seem snuffed out by winter’s cold, wet blanket. The lovely Persephone is bound for her half-year in Hades, taking our summer with her.
It may only be winter’s coming that puts death on our minds. Or it may be that the spirits of the underworld really do come calling this time of year, and that Hallowe’en is the open door through which they pass.
All those little ghosts fluttering in our neighbors’ trees are calling cards marking households that give ghosts their due. “Don’t bother to stop here,” the black cats, harvest kings, spiders and inflatable skeletons signal. “We’re frightful enough.”
“Any frights you have in stock would be superfluous at our house. If you really need to scare the living daylights out of somebody, try the house next door. They didn’t bother to put up any decorations. They’re quite unprotected.”
The jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts are scarecrows scaring away the beckoning underworld as ghosts appeal to us through Hallowe’en’s open door.
So why the good mood? Why are all the little ghouls and Freddies and goblins and monsters and velociraptors shrieking with delight as they run from house to house to extort candy? Why are big kids and grown-ups dressing up, too? Why’s Hallowe’en such a party?
All those little ghosts are crooking their fingers and calling to us in fond, familiar ways: we’re hearing voices of old friends we have loved and lost. We’re hearing our own sweet ghost in them.
Come on. Let’s carve the pumpkin and put a candle in it.
Dear Reader, I wrote most of the words you’ve just read 26 years ago, for publication in New Bay Times’ Volume 1, No 14, on October 21, 1993.
That was a season of beginning. This is a season of ending. Yet this is exactly what I want to say to you this year, this month, this day — when the issues of Bay Weekly that have appeared routinely for 26 years have so few to follow them and the work of all those years seems so bittersweet. As there’s no sense wasting perfectly good words, here they are again.
How apt, you’ll notice, for the feature story I’ve offered you this week, I Gave My Ghost His Due. And for Mr. Death’s appearance, thanks to our long-contributing humorist Allen Delaney.
My Bay Weekly Wheel of Memory
Who better to recall from Bay Weekly’s history than our contributors who are our own familiar ghosts? Each of them burned with such bright light that it still blazes in memory — and, as many of these beloved contributors were writers, in the stories you’ll find online if you look them up by name linked to the words “Bay Weekly.”
Sandra Lee Anderson, Bruce Bauer, Bill Burton, Vernon Gingell, Francis Gouin, Dawn Kittrell, Sonia Linebaugh, Audrey Scharmen, Kristen Sohr, John ‘Bud’ Taylor, Bobby Weckback, Janie and Arthur White, Richard Wilson, William Wohlfeld …