I am a day when the high priest enters the Most Holy Place once a year to make atonement. What day am I?

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Last updated on: October 30, 2009 at 4:33 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2009-10-30T16:33:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF

PUTTING THE ‘WE’ BACK IN HALLOWEEN WITH WEE MAN

Saturday will be my 10-year-old son Vasco’s first Halloween. He arrived in the U.S. from Africa just a few months ago, and as far as we can discern there is no Oct. 31 holiday in his native Malawi.

But as a fourth grader here in southern California, Vasco is all about Halloween. He’s been drawing skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns in art class, and his classmates are abuzz talking about what costumes they’ll be wearing when they go trick-or-treating this weekend.

Spiderman is among Vasco’s front-runners in the costume department, but then so is Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and Ace Ventura — the Jim Carrey character that can talk out of his bum and has a distinct swagger of which my son does a spot-on imitation. (The prospect of coaxing Vasco’s curly hair into a Ventura pompadour makes me almost giddy.) We’re heading to the local Costume Castle after school today to settle on his Halloween kit.

My most vivid childhood memory of Halloween is from 1977, the year we moved to a new neighborhood in Connecticut right after the school year had begun. I don’t recall what my costume was, but I do remember going door-to-door with my father, meeting new neighbors and collecting a heavy bag of candy, as the suburban warren of Cape Cods and manicured lawns morphed into an other-worldly fairyland.

I was 7 years old and the new kid on the block, so when the cover of darkness fell at sunset, I hadn’t a clue where I was. When my father navigated our way home in the crisp autumn night, it felt like he had done a magic trick. When the morning came, I couldn’t believe that our adventure the night before had been on these same streets. To my young imagination (and heart) it felt as if we had been walking through Narnia or Rivendell rather than a sleepy New England suburb.

A few years after that, my family stopped celebrating Halloween. We had become born-again Christians and our Southern Baptist church frowned on the practice. Halloween, I was taught, was an occult holiday (or maybe even Satanic!) and good Christians should have nothing to do with it.

So while other kids in the neighborhood continued their annual nightly pilgrimage, we would stay in or go to a church youth group function. My mother, God bless her, even tried handing out religious tracts to the trick-or-treaters. (Not a popular choice, if memory serves.)

I’m a new mother and I’m still a Christian (and so is my son), so when the Halloween candy aisle appeared at the local grocery store, I wondered for a moment what to do. But then, recalling that magical night 32 years ago, I decided that if he chose to, Vasco could celebrate Halloween with all the trimmings — costumes, jack-o’-lanterns, plastic spiders and spray-on webs, spooky music, face paint, and trick-or-treating.

In the seaside village to which we recently relocated, Halloween is a big deal. Everyone dresses up — moms and dads and grandparents and kids alike. And the trick-or-treating ritual is just as I remember it as that 7-year-old girl, when nearly every house opened its front door and had buckets of candy to share; the night I met many of my neighbors for the first time and when the darkness that I was normally so afraid of became a miraculous, transformative veil.

Vasco is a little afraid of the dark. Over the last few months we’ve been weaning him off of having every light in the room on when he goes to sleep. He’s down to a single (if fairly powerful) night-light now, and, more importantly, his fear of the dark (and all that he can’t see) is waning.

One of the best descriptions of Halloween’s transcendent and experiential meaning comes from a book called Seeking Enlightenment … Hat by Hat: A Skeptic’s Path to Religion by Nevada Barr. In it the author says:

“Halloween traditionally was the night we were given the freedom to explore the dark — not to find and be the evil but to see that the night was as beautiful as the day, that we were powerful, others were kind, that there was candy behind those closed doors and strangers who gave us treats. Being trusted to walk by ourselves in the world at night is an important ritual. That it comes but one day a year when we are small lets us discover this place, said to be inhabited by sinister forces, slowly and safely and by ourselves.”

Halloween’s roots are in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (“sow-ain”), which marked the end of the harvest and the coming of winter — a transition from the lightest days of the year to the darkest.

The Celts taught that the physical world and the spiritual world existed side-by-side, separated by a thin veil and during Samhain, that veil was so thin it was nearly transparent.

Thin moments are, to me, those times when we can see most clearly God reaching God’s hands into the world, whether it’s in the sacred space of a church sanctuary or the beckoning welcome of a neighbor’s open front door on an autumn night.

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