239. IT'S HALLOWEEN, NOT A HORROR SHOW by un'Americana a Venezia

People in Venice have often asked me what Halloween is all about.  I tell them that it hasn't always been about monsters and maniacs.  Halloween is still the only recurring opportunity for children of several English-speaking nations to wear costumes, unlike the children of Italy who get to wear carnival costumes in the days preceding Lent.  Halloween is not an official holiday in the U.S.  The reason it is observed there, however, has everything to do with North America's once largely Scotch-Irish population, people whose ancestors have always observed All Hallows Eve in one form or another.  For years, all American children went door to door in disguise on the last night of October getting free "treats" from adults.  It was innocent fun, even though some of the rowdier kids would play "tricks" on people, such as smearing their windows with soap. Several decades ago, a few evil crackpots in America began tainting the sweets they offered to trick-or-treaters.  Halloween for American kids was soon reduced to scheduled daytime outings and parties.  They still wear disguises on or near Halloween, however.  Super heroes, princesses, and cartoon characters predominate.  Plenty go dressed as hobos or ghosts, the easiest costumes of all.  In recent years, many Americans have begun decorating their lawns for Halloween.  They resort to skeletons, tombstones, ghosts, bats, and spider webs.  The truth is, the only appropriate Halloween decorations are corn stalks, haystacks, bushels of apples and winter squash, not all that creepy Gothic junk imported from China.  Long, long before Europeans stumbled upon America, Halloween was a major holiday for the Celtic peoples of Ireland, the British Isles, and northwestern France.  It marked the end of the light half of the year (spring and summer) and the start of the dark half (autumn and winter).  Called Samhain (pron. sow-inn), it also marked the tail end of harvest.  Most historians agree that Samhain was the Celtic New Year as well.  The Celts believed that the veil separating the living from the spirits of the dead, who dwelt in the Otherworld, was at its thinnest on Samhain.  The souls of the deceased were welcome to participate in the festivities, guided home by bonfires.  Places were set for them at table.  Firelight pierced the long night, seen today in the lingering tradition of the jack-o'-lantern, the illuminated pumpkin.  At Samhain, the Celts reduced their herds and feasted on meat and harvest foods at an unusually large communal dinner.  Afterwards, they told each other's new year fortunes.  Finally, each family would take away a torch lit from the sacred bonfire, to light their hearth anew.  With the adoption of Christianity, the Celts slowly relinquished the Old Ways, that is, their ancient religious practices, although loyalty to the clan and close ties to the land remained, as did Samhain.  Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, known also as All Souls' Night.  The day after, All Hallows (November 1st), is not celebrated in the U.S.  "All Hallows' Eve" was compacted into a single word, Halloween, and here we are, the unwitting heirs of an ancient Celtic tradition, contending with vampires, devils, and scary witches.  None of those masks recalls the old feast.  Halloween is, or was, supposed to be a night in which to remember the departed, celebrate a harvest, and symbolically chase away the coming darkness of winter.  Perhaps modern culture badly needs to reexamine this observance.  We need to turn off the horror show, especially in Italy where the youth imitate Americanized customs and now wrongly assume that Halloween has always been about magic and carnage.  It hasn't.  I can remember our own old ways in America, the fun of preparing fanciful costumes, waiting impatiently for the teachers' cue to put them on in order to parade them neatly through our school.  Then in the evening we went out in our disguises, confidently ringing doorbells, first with our parents when we were very small, then later, with our friends.  With the bright moon shadowed by clouds, and the autumn wind shaking the branches, and leaves scuttling by, we were thrilled by both the occasion and our expanding bags of Halloween candy.  And though we didn't quite realize it then, we had been caught up for the whole of a day in the wonder of being able to share such a strange and unique time in our lives with others.    UN’AMERICANA A VENEZIA