Halloween and its Enemies By Jeet Heer Boston Globe Ideas (October 27, 2002) HALLOWEEN HAS ITS enemies. For some parents and civic authorities, the hallowtide holiday has long seemed a wayward festival in need of reformation. In 1950, the US Senate Judiciary Committee went so far as to advise renaming it "Youth Honor Day" in order to help "direct the activities of young people into less-destructive channels on Halloween day of each year." Yet the mark of a strong holiday is that it can survive the attacks of its harshest critics. Just as Christmas became sweeter after Charles Dickens unleashed the bracing sarcasm of Ebenezer Scrooge, the dark magic of Halloween increases in potency with every fresh complaint against it. The story of Halloween, as told in two new cultural histories, Nicholas Rogers's Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night and David J. Skal's Death Makes A Holiday, is the story of a resilient festival that fends off criticism and thrives on reinvention. The earliest critics of Halloween were the ancient Romans. When Julius Caesar sent an expeditionary force to the British Isles in 55 and 54 B.C., his men encountered the local Celts, whose strange rituals shocked the imperial troops. In his account of the Gallic war, Caesar claimed that the Celts had created a giant effigy "of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flames." Today, historians often discount such lurid Roman tales of human sacrifice and cannibalism, believing them to be no more than propaganda. But there's little question that the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the onset of a bleak northern winter, was a decidedly spooky and otherworldly event. The Irish sagas that mention Samhain tell of ominous prophecies and the death of heroes. "Samhain was a time of divine couplings and dark omens, a time when malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops," notes Rogers. Like many pagan holidays, Samhain was eventually absorbed into the Catholic Church's liturgical calendar: In medieval Britain, it became Hallowtide, a kind of preamble to All Saints' Day. Well into the evening, bells were rung in honor of great Christian martyrs and heroes now departed. The bell-ringing had other purposes as well: It was believed to shorten the time that loved ones spent in purgatory, as well as to ward off demons. The Protestant reformation did not tolerate such things. Protestants opposed both prayers directed at saints and the whole idea of purgatory. In 1548, King Edward VI banned the traditional ringing of the bells for the dead on Oct. 31st, while his successors struck the day off the Anglican calendar altogether. Halloween died in southern England. In North America, the Puritans who settled New England may have believed in witches, but they certainly did not celebrate Hallowtide. Far from London and other centers of power, however, Halloween continued to flourish in the British Isles. In Ireland and Scotland, local youths seized upon the subversive potential of a murky day that marked both seasonal and spiritual transition. Under the cover of darkness, young people fashioned a holiday that allowed for covert courtships and rowdy pranks. By the 18th century, Halloween was taking a more secular form as ritualistic pranks supplanted religious rites. "Mimicking the malignant spirits who were widely believed to be abroad on Halloween, gangs of youth blocked up chimneys, rampaged cabbage patches, battered doors, unhinged gates, and unstabled horses," Rogers notes. As with sibling festivals such as the Mexican Day of the Dead or New Orleans's Mardi Gras, Halloween drew on a carnival spirit where the rules of the social order were temporarily turned upside down. Today, much of what we consider Halloween comes from the rich folk culture of continental Europe in the early modern period. Trick or treating, for example, derives from the hazing ritual of charivari, in which masked young men tease an unpopular neighbor until they receive gifts. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought Halloween to North America when they arrived in the 18th and 19th centuries. Initially regarded as an ethnic festival, the holiday eventually gained widespread popularity because it offered relief from the family-focused piety of holidays such as Christmas. Despite its Catholic roots, Halloween also had the advantage of seeming less sectarian than either the Catholics' St. Patrick's Day or the Protestants' Pope Day (a 19th-century New England adaptation of Guy Fawkes Day during which effigies of the pontiff were burned). While these two annual commemorations sharply divided Irish immigrant communities, Halloween brought people together. By the end of the 19th century, Halloween was being celebrated by many groups with no ancestral links to the British Isles, including African-Americans. In an age of mass immigration, Halloween had become a classic example of an immigrant ritual that was added into the melting pot of American culture. Yet even in the New World, this rambunctious holiday continued to be controversial. As Skal notes, Halloween pranks often got out of hand -particularly in the early 20th century. He recounts an incident from 1934 when mild horseplay among New Yorkers "rapidly escalated from harmless flour and ash pelting to rock throwing to automobile vandalism." The police estimated that 400 youngsters, black and white, were involved in various melees, which culminated with a car being heisted and rolled down a 50-foot embankment in Riverside Park, where its tires were slashed. In the following year, the Houston Chronicle complained that Halloween "gives permit for unlicensed and unbridled mischief. It is an unregenerate day, needing redemption." Starting in the 1930s, churches, parent groups, and local police worked hard to tame Halloween. Rogers traces the American version of trick-or-treating back to 1939, and notes that it was the cornerstone of the campaign to create a less rowdy holiday. Adults wanted a safe and sane Halloween rather than a carnival of property damage. In the postwar decades, a family-friendly, suburban version of Halloween flourished. For the first time, Halloween became predominately a children's holiday - as well as a mass-consumption festival of store-bought candy and costumes. (Americans typically spend approximately $1.5 billion every year on costumes and $3 billion on party accessories. But the efforts to keep Halloween child-focused and non-threatening did not entirely succeed. In the late 1970s, aspiring trick-or-treaters were often deterred by urban legends about razor blades in apples and by more substantial fears of crime. In rust-belt cities such as Detroit, Halloween became a "Devil's Night" of arson and mayhem. Yet Halloween has recovered from these troubles. In the late 1980s, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and local activists mobilized to establish an "Angel's Night" that aimed to beat back the Devil by combining alternative activities for young people with tough curfews. The nationwide drop in the crime rate throughout the 1990s has revitalized trick-or-treating. And, as in the past, marginal social groups have continued to reinvent the holiday. In cities all across North America gay men and women have made Halloween into a public display of pride with exuberant parades and street parties. These eye-catching celebrations haven't been without their opponents. In 1990, televangelist Larry Lea decided to perform an exorcism at the popular Oct. 31st celebration on San Francisco's Castro Street. Local activists responded to Lea's plan by organizing GHOST - Grand Homosexual Outrage at Sickening Televangelists. The evangelist brought more than 6,000 "Prayer Warriors" with him and they clashed with the largely gay crowd, which threw eggs and fruit at the unwelcome visitors and chanted "The people, perverted, will never be converted." But while some religious conservatives continue to denounce Halloween as a "satanic" holiday, other church groups have turned Oct. 31st into Hallelujah Nights, Harvest Festivals, or "Holyween," where young people are encouraged to dress up as their favorite biblical character. One church in Arvada, Colo., created Hell House, a religiously inspired haunted house designed to illustrate the evils of the modern world. "In the first room, a man dies of AIDS," Rogers notes. "In the second, a woman writhes from an abortion... Finally, having passed through a hell reeking of Limburger cheese, visitors are blessed by Jesus and saved." Elsewhere, Halloween also continues to adopt new guises and provoke controversy. Along the southwest border of the United States, Halloween is merging with the Mexican Day of the Dead to create a new hybrid holiday. France too is now fashioning its own version of the festivity. While some critics decry the cultural imperialism of Yankee holidays like Halloween entering their societies, this repackaging of ghoulish pop culture images should not surprise us. It merely demonstrates, once again, that Halloween can always be reinvented with a fresh mask.