I can’t be the only mother who secretly detests Halloween.  I hate the costume planning that inserts itself into a busy harvest season, requiring either absurd amounts of money or the investment of astronomical commitments of time at a sewing machine for one evening of candy-drugged over-stimulation.  It inevitably results in crazed children raging between tears of artificial coloring-induced mania and fits of hysterical energy surges from high fructose corn syrup and sugar.  This night of genuine horror is then followed by the sticky days of the ensuing period, where my little monsters fixate on the candy hoard, attempting to wheedle, sneak and negotiate for incessant sugar hits from the stash.  Their slowed access to the drugs merely drags out the torture, stimulating a week-long addictive period ,where they vacillate between the highs and lows of their sugar hits.  I am put in a position of either kill joy or liar as I attempt to control their access, and then, eventually, make it all disappear while they aren’t looking.

We have tried distracting them with Halloween parties, where wholesome treats were put before my children and their friends as an alternative to trick-or-treating.  But then, in addition to all the costume preparations, we were faced with the task of interrupting our regular labors to add in new ones:   Dust away the real cobwebs and replace them with fake ones; come up with grain-free, dairy-free, locally-based, earth-friendly menu choices (thankfully potato vodka is a local grain-free food around these parts); host the party; and finally, watch our kids moan with despair as each of their friends leave to go trick or treating, while we stay home with a pile of dishes and party detritus to wash up.  I fantasized about simply removing the holiday from the calendar, but our culture simply makes that impossible.

 

Instead, a few years ago, I began investigating the historical roots of the holiday, hoping to find some other palatable tradition that would offer our family a celebration without all the torture.  Investigating my own heritage, I read up on the ancient Druid practices for the festival for Samhain, who was their Lord of the Dead.  The eve of that festival, the earliest Halloween celebrations, were marked by fire rites, where animals, prisoners of war and criminals were burned alive in baskets as part of a method for portending the future.  And I thought Tootsie Rolls were bad.

The Druids were eventually invaded by the Romans, who had their own festivals of the dead, such as Feralia.  This was a February festival where offerings were made to the ancestors, and an old woman would put some beans in her mouth, smear a fish head with pitch and roast it over a fire. Hmm.  That might be a hard sell for the girls.  Anyhow, according to my reading, Feralia eventually migrated over to October and November, to merge with the Druid Samhain, as did the Roman Feast to honor the goddess of the orchards, Pomona. Burning prisoners and animals was replaced by bobbing for apples and leaving gifts for the ancestors.  A nice improvement.  A few hundred years later, the rise of Christianity put the church’s stamp on the holiday, by adding in All Saints Day, in memory of Christian martyrs.  While this holiday was originally celebrated in May, it too migrated over to early November.

 

Three spiritual traditions all seemed to concur that there is something about this time of year that deserves special attention.  And while I would love to be done with the candy, the costumes and the trick or treating, and I certainly have no desire to burn ritual sacrifices, I do believe there is magic in this time.  We are midway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.  The days are growing perceptively darker.  The leaves are withered and decaying on the ground.  The animals are being slaughtered for winter.  The garden plants are pulled from the ground, and the soil turned under.  The world around us is in the process of dying and returning to the earth.

 

And in that death process, I see the need to celebrate.  Our modern consumer culture reveres life and eschews death.  Factory farming systems help people to disassociate the slaughter of animals from the packaged food in grocery stores.  We are daily bombarded with advertisements, books, and news stories for anti-aging creams, anti-aging drugs, anti-aging diets, anti-aging exercise plans.  And too often, the sick, the aging and the dying are removed from their homes and their families, sequestered away from sight, so that our daily lives permit us to see only the living and the healthy.

But death is the other half of life.  There is no sustenance that we can take into our bodies that does not require death.  There is no way to sustain balance on our earth without death.  The life and death of each ancestor has lead to each spirit that walks this earth at this moment, including myself, and all those whom I love dearly.  The death of the livestock and the gardens and the flowers and the grass mean rest.  The return of darkness means reprieve.

 

Thus, celebrating the last few days of October and these first few days of November is critically important as I help my children to envision a sustainable future.  Sustainability requires death.  It means accepting our mortality without fear.  It requires making friends with death.

And while I still don’t think M&Ms  are a suitable way to celebrate, I am willing to let that go on October 31st.  Because in exchange, on a different night, our family has our own quiet, private, celebration of death.  We spread pictures of deceased loved ones across our kitchen counter.  We decorate further with skulls, skeletons and bones, all the beautiful mortal remains we can think of.  We light candles for the animals who have been slaughtered that sustain our lives and our livelihood.  We light candles for any loved ones we have lost over the year.  We light candles in honor of the ancestors in each of our family branches.

Bob and the girls harvest asparagus fronds to make a crone.  We parade her to the garden, where we pour over the soil a glass of cider pressed from our wild apples.  We bring the crone inside and seat her at the head of our table, where she reigns supreme over our dinner.  We eat a simple stew, made from our harvest, leaving a bowl for the crone and our ancestors, and offering helpings to our canine companions.      We talk about who went before us, we give prayers of thanks for their lives and the energy they brought to this world.  We privately sit before their photos and talk to them.  We give thanks for the food, for each other, and for the darkness and death that allows us our rest and renewal.    And in this night of prayer, feasting and ritual, we teach our children that death, too, is worthy of celebration.  We help them to confront their fears of mortality, just as we confront our own.

I still hate trick or treating.  But I do allow it, as I have learned that I cannot always ignore all aspects of my culture that I do not like.  But over the years, as our family has drawn on history to build a new tradition to celebrate the full circle of life, including the macabre, I find I am more at ease with a night of trick or treating.  We have our own quiet celebration of death, and all the real cobwebs in my house can stay in place….until my mother-in-law comes for Thanksgiving…

This essay was written by Shannon Hayes, whose blog, RadicalHomemakers.com, is supported by the sale of her books, farm products and handcrafts. If you like the writing and want to support this type of creative work, please consider visiting the blog’s farm and book store.

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