October Advent, Day 2: Ridiculing Death

The Wikipedia page on Halloween is around 7,000 words long and has nearly 200 footnotes. It’s a good place to start if you want to learn how to appreciate this twisted holiday, which is my intent for this advent.

According to Sam Portaro, a reverend who’s quoted in the page’s first paragraph, Halloween has traditionally revolved around the theme of using “humor and ridicule to confront the power of death.”

In other words, Halloween isn’t so different from Christmas and Easter, with their primal concerns about conquering death. Halloween just goes about the whole business with whimsy rather than reverence.

Of course, Portaro says confronting the power of death is what Halloween has traditionally been about. Is that what it’s still about? I never thought I was confronting the power of death as I went door to door, plunking candy into my pillow case. I never thought about death as I annually donned my Woody costume for another Halloween party.

I never got the notion that these creepy decorations scattered around the house — spiders crawling up the door, tombstones in the yard, skulls on the coffee table — were all ridiculing death.

However, if that’s the case then suddenly this plastic riff-raff is actually not just an expensive way to mess up my house (as I’d previously thought). Instead, it’s about living directly with our fears in order to laugh at (and thereby confirm) how trivial they are in the grand scheme of things.

Is that it?

If so, how does candy and my Woody costume fit into the holiday? Let’s wait to answer that in a later post. One Wikipedia quote at a time. ;)