Earth's Northern Hemisphere is tilting a bit farther from the sun with each passing day, causing daylight hours to shorten and leaves to turn. Fall has made itself known even down here in Florida, where acorns have dropped and overnight temps have danced playfully around the edges of cool.
Jack O'lanterns are carved; consumables of all types are available in pumpkin-spiced flavors and scents; Märzen beers are pouring from barroom taps; and front porches are decorated in orange, yellow, scarlet, and amber.
All of which is to say: We are at Halloween's threshold.
Kids will soon be traipsing from door to door asking for treats from adults, many of whom have already celebrated with costume parties of their own. Fun is in the air regardless of whether you prefer cartoon specials or scary movies. And although you can always find a few killjoys out there, most folks agree the fun is harmless.
Between excited children, happy parents, mischievous teens, adults acting like teens, and that handful of well-intentioned scolds convinced that to enjoy Halloween is to praise the demonic, the odds of hearing anything about the holiday's actual roots and purpose are far too low, and this is what brings me to my keyboard today.
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Contra what millions believe, Halloween is neither based on nor co-opted from an old Celtic festival of the dead (more on that to come in a future post) but instead comes straight from Christian thinking and tradition. And while many are passingly aware the word "Halloween" comes from "All Hallows' Eve," few know what that means.
Going back to Christianity's Judaic roots, the observance of holidays has traditionally begun not on the holiday itself but on the evening before. Due at least partly to the custom of Sabbath commencing at sundown Friday rather than sunup Saturday, this is what gave rise to Christmas Eve being such a big deal.
All Hallows' Day, aka All Saints' Day, is a Christian holiday initiated to honor the martrys who died for the faith, and thus the evening before All Hallows' Day became important as All Hallows' Eve.
Back in the day, "eve" and "even" were interchangeable, so All Hallows' Eve was often called All Hallows' Even, which later got contracted to Hallowe'en with the apostrophe denoting the missing v. Eventually, the apostrophe disappeared and we landed on Halloween.
Put yourself in the shoes of early Christians. Far from being some distant thing that could be thought of later, death was a constant, lingering presence hovering over their heads. Starting with Stephen in the Book of Acts and continuing for centuries, being killed for refusing to renounce your allegiance to Christ was a genuine threat, and the expectation was that you would choose death if put to the test.
Most of the apostles died martyr's deaths - Peter crucified upside down, Bartholomew flayed, Simon the Zealot sawed in half - and that danger continued apace after the apostles were gone.
Later on, Polycarp was burned at the stake and Sebastian bludgeoned and Warinus stoned and multitudes beheaded. 40 confessors at Sebaste (present day Sivas, Turkey) were forced naked onto a frozen pond to perish from exposure.
And don't go around thinking women were spared the executioner's sword, for among the martyrs were Perpetura, Felicity, Agnes, Euphemia, Lucy, and Petronilla. Also, don't go around thinking youth were spared, for Agnes herself was only 12.
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But back to what I said a moment ago: For early Christians, death was a constant presence they could not avoid thinking of. Even if the reality of persecution and possible martyrdom could have been removed, the realities of disease and famine in the centuries before modern medicine and agribusiness were still there. So meditating upon death was important and practical - and was absolutely Christian when you think of all the biblical admonitions concerning it.
Such meditations in Christendom go way back, as evidenced by skulls being carved onto tombstones and displayed in churches to emphasize memento mori (Latin for "remember you must die") as well as paintings of skeletons doing the Danse Macabre (French for "Dance of Death"). Such motifs were meant as solemnity, not sacrilege, for it was important to think of death with reverence lest it fill you dread.
When it came to All Hallows' Day, Christians gathered at tombs and memorials to commemorate those who died honorably, often gathering at night to avoid being seen by their persecutors - hence the centrality of those sunless hours bridging All Hallows' Eve and All Hallows' Day.
In the earliest years, they gathered on the anniversaries of individual martyrs' deaths. However, there came to be so many martyrs that it was impractical to celebrate each one individually; and therefore, All Hallows' Day became an occasion to celebrate them all at once.
On a similar note, there is also the fact that a deceased person need not be martyred in order to life a life worthy of honor after he or she is gone. As a result, the day after All Hallows' Day eventually became All Souls' Day, a broader commemoration of "the faithful departed."
Collectively, the three days from All Hallows' Eve through All Souls' Day became known as Allhallowtide.
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The season of Allhallowtide presents an imperfect symmetry with the three-day Easter weekend that spans from Good Friday through Resurrection Sunday. At first glance, some may say there is a significant difference because Easter looks at life while Allhallowtide looks at death. Ironically, however, that dichotomy is only true if one accepts the secular concept of life ceasing when the body dies, for Christianity, like almost all the world's faiths, holds that life continues beyond Earth and never truly ends.
Scripture is clear there is an afterlife that has different possible destinations, but it's noticeably silent about the specifics of what happens between the moment we die and the moment we arrive at whatever our destination is. Of all the speculations offered over the years by traditions and theologians, the one that is by far the rarest happens to be that fluffily comfy modern notion that we instantly find ourselves face to face with our maker in a state of unsurpassable bliss.
To the contrary, even the most avowedly Once-Saved-Always-Saved Protestants, the ones who seem to have an allergic reaction whenever they hear the word "purgatory" spoken out loud, fully expect to undergo a period of posthumous pain discomfort during which they must sit for a life review and answer for their sins.
To experience that purifying pain discomfort is actually a good thing, because it means you're en route to Heaven, but nevertheless it is something we want to avoid or at least keep to a minimum. Yet we tend to keep sinning, don't we? And thus the uncertainty of that interval between bodily death and heavenly entrance remains out there, no matter how many times we try to ignore it, and I think it goes without saying that ignoring it does no good.
In the British Isles of 1400 A.D., a Halloween practice known as "souling" was already being described in writing, by John Mirk, as having come from "olden time." Souling occurred when poor people, including children, would go door to door in richer neighborhoods offering prayers in exchange for soul cakes.
Those biscuit-like cakes were made from oats and often sweetened with things like nutmeg, cinnamon, raisins, currants. The prayers spoken when the cakes were given were for the souls of the homeowners' relatives and friends, typically ones who were already perished.
This interaction at the opening of Allhallowtide deepened faith and strengthened community bonds. Plus, it served a further heavenly purpose by placing the reality of death and the interval front and center, thereby emphasizing something that would, much later, be expressed in words by a certain American pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal."
Souling still takes place in Portugal and the Philippines, and, as you might have guessed, it is what gave rise to the 20th century idea of trick-or-treating.
Halloween, like Christmas, has been commercialized in the modern West. But the big scandal is that modern Western Christians have permitted it to be retroactively misrepresented as a celebration of witchcraft, demonology, and the occult - and the biggest scandal is that some modern Christians have been enthusiastic participants in that misrepresentation.
'Tis time for that to end, in my humble opinion.
Note: The photo at the beginning of this post was taken in Graham County, North Carolina.
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