Something is amiss when the garish and grotesque displays go up earlier and get uglier every year even as people’s belief in their religious purpose fades.
Something is amiss when the garish and grotesque displays go up earlier and get uglier every year even as people’s belief in their religious purpose fades.
I t starts earlier and earlier every year. This year it began two months ago — a full quarter year before the event. I’m talking about the merchandising promotion of Halloween. The amount of time, money, and energy people are now spending on Halloween has reached ridiculous proportions — and manifestations. In a leafy residential neighborhood with muti-million-dollar single-family homes near my parish, people for some reason feel compelled to decorate their lawns with bloody dismembered vampire babies and other grotesque spectacles. Friends of mine tell me they can’t walk their toddlers down certain streets for fear of how certain images will affect their children. What are people who hang bloody effigies of babies in their front yards thinking? What message are they trying to convey? What is the purpose of such disgusting displays? What does Halloween mean to them?
The more the sense of the true meaning of a holiday is lost, the more people overcompensate with an extended orgy of shopping, decorating, consuming. They are trying to evoke some sort of feeling from it — but the vacuousness of the effort, lacking any deeper significance, only engenders a fleeting emotional experience that ultimately leaves people empty. That’s the reason for the “post-holiday blues.” After an extended meaningless observance of a holiday, it’s natural to wonder: What was the point of it all?
The original point of many holidays was religious — the word “holiday” itself denotes a sacred commemoration. The loss of the sense of the sacred reduces holidays to banal secular conventions. Only a true sense of a feast provides a reason for festivity; only embracing the profound meaning of a celebration results in lasting joy.
Thus, instead of recalling the inspiring examples of all the saints and praying for the deceased, Halloween becomes all about skeletons and candy. Instead of remembering the holiness of the Patron Saint of Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day means wearing green and drinking beer. Instead of one last hurrah of feasting before a long season of penance, Mardi Gras (or Carnival, “farewell to meat”) requires wearing beads and getting plastered. Instead of being about the Resurrection of Jesus, Easter focuses on bunnies and eggs. And instead of celebrating the birth of Jesus the Savior, Christmas entails over-the-top light displays, fraught shopping for presents, themeless office parties, and vapid holiday songs: Most people hear more of Mariah Carey than of the Gospels of Matthew or Luke. All we should really want for Christmas is Jesus.
Divorced from spiritual purpose, people have no reason to live, nothing truly to celebrate. So they go overboard trying frantically to experience something to be happy about. But pleasure isn’t the same thing as happiness. And the lack of happiness is reflected in the holiday attempts to escape, dull the senses, and self-medicate through drunkenness and debauchery. Without the supernatural, the natural degenerates into the unnatural. No longer just a fun evening for children originally based on celebrating the saints, Halloween night has become a huge adult event, a bacchanalia of indecent outfits and binge drinking.
Don’t get me wrong: As someone with a wicked sweet tooth, I’m all about a holiday on which people throw free candy at you. When I was growing up, my family embraced making costumes and going trick-or-treating. But we also — more significantly — went to Mass to honor the solemn feast of All Saints to recall their great examples and to implore their heavenly intercession. We knew that the saints knew what life was ultimately all about. Sure, Christians have always celebrated spiritual feasts with material festivities. But their rejoicing has always been genuine because they know it is rooted in something deeper, because the material flows from, and points back to, the spiritual.
Unless we rediscover the spiritual dimension of our holidays, we are condemned to remain unsatisfied by them. If we become intentional about focusing on the original purposes of our holidays, then we will find meaning for our lives and a resulting profound joy.