It may be a pagan festival but thank God for Halloween and all its joys: the child’s delight at being dressed up and out after dark, our thrill at pretending to be frightened, the faint sense that for one night, the ordinary world has slipped its moorings.
On Halloween, the country briefly remembers how to laugh at fear, instead of scrolling through it. This crown jewel of autumn strikes me as one of those events that manages to be both utterly absurd and, in its way, rather necessary. Like the Eurovision song contest, or marriage.
Everyone from kids in Poundland skeleton suits to adults with too much eyeliner join this grand communal theatre of the macabre. It’s democracy with fake blood and carnivalesque chaos powered by Haribo. Americans do Halloween like Broadway; we do it like an amateur panto in a draughty hall, but with great heart.
Halloween is becoming Christmas in a witch’s hat
Halloween is a harmless bit of foolishness that does us a lot of good as long as it’s not taken too seriously – and that’s the problem. Over the past ten years or so we’ve started taking everything too seriously. Even broomsticks.
Halloween was traditionally stress-free because there was no pressure to buy merchandise, swap presents or spend time with family members we find annoying. Without the weight of those expectations, people seemed to actually enjoy Halloween, rather than just pretending to, as they do with Christmas, with its family arguments, drained bank accounts and bulging waistlines.
But it’s becoming harder to enjoy Halloween because it’s now being stretched over weeks. When did a single-day festival become a ‘spooky season’? You go into the shops in mid-September and they’ve already vomited orange and black displays across the aisles like a satanic migraine. By the time the actual day arrives, everyone’s sick of it.
It’s not just that Halloween starts too early, it sometimes finishes too late. This year it falls on a Friday, so some people will try and stretch it over the weekend. A festival that’s meant to be a single day in October will have begun in September and rolled into early November.
And then, just as the last pumpkin collapses in the garden, Christmas leaps out from behind a display of discounted mince pies, demanding our attention like an insatiable, demonic toddler. The relentless commercial calendar marches on, offering no time to breathe, recover or reflect. If capitalism had its way, we’d be carving pumpkins in July and hanging tinsel by September. Even Easter, once a short interlude of eggs and sermons, now involves a month-long supermarket siege.
One of the joys of the traditional British calendar was that things happened when they were supposed to. The fireworks came out on November 5th. Christmas began when you hung your stockings out on December 24th. We didn’t start celebrating things months in advance because we knew that the joy of festivals lies in their boundaries. They give shape to the year, a sense of rhythm – and when they spill across the calendar, the charm dissolves into tedium and we never quite know where we are.
Halloween, once a humble evening of mischief and sugar, has swollen into a retail campaign stretching over several weeks. It’s becoming Christmas in a witch’s hat. And yet – even with all this nonsense – it still works. It is social glue wrapped in cobwebs and a glowing ember of community in the encroaching dark. It helps make the year feel like a story with chapters, but like all the best stories, it needs a beginning and an end. It should be one night: 31 October.
If we can manage that – if we can enjoy the mischief without turning it into another months-long marketing marathon – then Halloween will remain what it should be: a short, sharp burst of anarchy before winter comes along and swallows us whole.
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