Thursday, November 1, 2012

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Oh wait. That was yesterday. Happy All Saints Day.


Halloween is a fun day – people get to dress up and be someone else for a few hours. For the kids that go trick-or-treating, it’s a fun way to see the neighbors in a world where people see increasingly less of each other in the neighborhood. The kids are adorable (for the most part), the parents are smiling and happy and even the family pets come out in costume. With my kids out of the house and grown up, it is probably less significant to me. I never was a major player for Halloween, although I’ve always been fascinated by the origins.

A pagan holiday. Yep. Some will even say a satanic holiday. I’ve been a member of churches where they rallied against it, but as a Lutheran, we had another thing to celebrate, Reformation Day. But my “intellectual” interest in Halloween (if I dare to refer to myself in that vein) is always piqued. The “Fire Feasts” and Celtic superstitions have always fascinated me. Halloween is Samhain. I love a good scary story, always have (scary, not gory). Ghosts and goblins and fairies and their holidays. I suppose that’s why I can’t seem to avoid allusions to those things in my own writing. I’m not committed to go full tilt into the whole paranormal realm with my writing, but we all have a little mysticism in our lives that defies explanation. That’s where you find me on the subject. I’m not going to go full bore into theories and debates, but writing is about imagination. I have my own beliefs on the subject of the supernatural and most of them are in line with Christian doctrine.

So like Halloween or hate Halloween, whichever side of the fence you’re on (and fortunately it’s not usually a polarizing topic), for one day out of the year, it’s fun to remember that sometimes there’s more to this life than we know about. And it’s fun to have an excuse to knock on a neighbor’s door and say hello (even if it’s just to beg for candy).

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