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By Maria Puente, USA TODAY
How nuts are Americans about Halloween? Seven
billion dollars' worth of nuts. Nine billion pieces of candy. Fifty
million greeting cards. Millions of costumes sold; millions of parties
attended. We are so nuts, the government recently issued a stern
warning against buying Halloween contact lenses without a prescription
because they can blind people.
Talk about frightening. Scores of otherwise rational adults are willing to risk permanent eye damage — not to mention spend a huge amount of time and money — on an unofficial "holiday" rooted in pagan and then early Christian ritual that used to be restricted to kids and just one night a year. The reason, say retailers, historians and culture experts: Americans are suckers for a good time. As the national Mardi Gras, Halloween has evolved into a month-long celebration of many things: baby-boomer nostalgia. Transgressive behavior without consequences. Gay pride. Family togetherness. Harvest home. Entertaining and decorating as art forms. It's fun, fun, fun without guilt, guilt, guilt, says Jill Jones-Renger, 33, a devotee in Columbus, Ohio, who every year makes costumes, buys loads of candy, decorates while listening to Halloween music, carves scores of pumpkins and attends or hosts parties. "There's an inherent tension in Christmas with people trying to keep track of the spiritual or 'real' meaning amid huge commercialization, but you don't have that with Halloween," she says. "You can just buy what you want, behave as you want and not feel guilty or obligated."
It's the quintessential American holiday, says David Skal, author of Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, one of a spate of books tracing the evolution of Halloween. "We've been told from birth that we have the freedom to completely reinvent ourselves, and Halloween is the holiday that makes that literal," he says. "It's freedom from restrictions, from authority, when everything is turned on its head." Take David Dering of Lawrenceville, N.J. He packs his yard with figures stirring smoking cauldrons, a motorized flying ghost with glowing red eyes, a zombie coming out of a grave and a hooded man doing ... well, the usual. "People stop in front of my house and go, 'Oh my God, look at this.' " How did it come to this? According to historians, Halloween is not only America's most inventive holiday, it's also the most reinvented. It began about 2,700 years ago as a Celtic celebration of summer's end and ritual for the dead, was adopted by early Christians to honor martyrs and saints and arrived in America in the late 19th century as an Irish-Scottish festival associated with the harvest. After World War II and the advent of television, it took the trick-or-treat form beloved by baby boomers. "It was always a young-adult night from day one in pagan times, (but) it was reinvented as a 'kids' night' in the '40s and '50s," says Nicholas Rogers, a historian at York University in Toronto and author of a new book, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. He lists a number of reasons Halloween became what it is today: Working parents have no time to make things, so they buy. The scares of the 1980s, notably razor blades in apples, were overblown but enough to sour parents on trick-or-treating, so children now go to schools, malls, community centers and haunted houses for treats. Retailers responded to the changes, delivering new products as consumer demand mounted. "In the '70s, gays captured Halloween for a while, made it a drag-queen night and an opportunity to talk about sexual difference. And bars and restaurants realized they could make money on huge adult dress-up parties," Rogers says. Add to this Martha Stewart and the fine-living-and-entertaining mania she inspired. Just one example: The homey practice of making jack-o'-lanterns (from the Irish-Scottish harvest custom of commemorating souls with candles in turnips) has become an elaborate art form as people search the Internet for cool patterns and kits to buy. Another big influence is the 76-million-strong baby-boom generation, which retrieves happy memories by celebrating with their kids or on their own. "It was the golden age when we were kids," says Kirk Openlander, 40, of St. Peters, Mo., who is famous locally for his elaborate yard decorations; most of the handmade collection uses less than $100 worth of materials. Not everyone loves Halloween. Some Christian evangelicals disapprove of the pagan and occult aspects and organize their own haunted houses. They call them "hell houses" or "judgment houses" and are aimed at scaring young people away from, say, abortion or promiscuity. "We want to take back Halloween from the wrong side of the supernatural and present the Christian side," says Steve Vandegriff, director of Scaremare, the student-run haunted house at evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. For many, that's taking Halloween way too seriously. Connie Lait-ner, 40, of Omaha remembers when she and her siblings would roam the neighborhood, collect candy and have fun without fear. "Adults are so crazy over Halloween because it takes us back to a time of innocence," she says. "It makes us want to go back to when we had fun fear. It's not real, and it's not going to hurt anyone." |
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