Shadows for Breakfast

A treatise on tomb trickery: Halloween hijinks

I've got a flyer called "I Hate Halloween" that I found a couple of years ago in a library book, probably stuffed there by a disciple of the flyer's author, a Rev. R.L. Hymers out of downtown Los Angeles. The good reverend goes on at length about the satanic nature of our yearly glorification and gorification of death, quoting chapter and verse, and espousing judgment-day crash worship rhetoric. He even thought to print it on orange paper and put in cute clip art of witches, jack o' lanterns and more, which tend to make it all the more ludicrous. In fire-and-brimstone language, he decries this yearly demonic debauchery.

But the reverend has it all backwards. We don't idealize death on Halloween, we bring it down to earth. We don't laugh with death; we laugh at it. We give kids candy for wearing gruesome masks. We hang skeletons on the walls and carve eerie faces in garden vegetables.

The rest of the year we fear death. Death is no laughing matter except for today. Maybe I'm noir-sighted, but I've got problems with my death perception. Why not laugh at death? Why not rejoice in it as much as in birth? One is a beginning, one an end. It doesn't take eastern religion to realize these are the real ins and outs of life.

We bake our children in the oven of denial, the denial of the conception of lifespan, that a human life spans a finite period of time with a distinct beginning and end Q a notion that religions of all types have been diligently fighting for ages. So which witch is which? The one that cackles with glee as she subjects her youth to an inferno of existential doubt, or the one that dons a hideous mask and marches off with mom to get candy from the neighbors?

This all has nothing to do with satanism, but with a healthy understanding of the life process. Reverend Hymers fears Halloween because it is designed to tell the world more than he thinks it ought to know. Halloween is a threat to his worldview. He doesn't want you to laugh at death Q you might quit fearing it so terribly, and his church would be out of business. His ticket to the afterlife might cease to be such a valued commodity.

So put on your mask of constant decay. It's autumn and the leaves are turning brown, falling down and spinning tales of the patterns of birth and death that weave together and form in colorful streams on the paths of human existence.

Halloween shows us it's what's on the inside that matters Q blood, guts, gore and bones. I didn't find God inside myself, but it's up to each of us to do the looking Q even Reverend Hymers. Instead I found a telltale heart pounding out in Morse code the difference between life and death and the strength to laugh at the latter, to both defy it and deny it by celebrating Halloween.

Wear your insides on the outside. It's time for the day of the dead. So what if death stalks us at every corner? It just means we'll have to buy more candy.