Love Is Not Enough | Chaelisa

Chapter 12

Halloween.

The holiday that's name was originally the festival of Samhein, was a superstitious and religious day. The one that was started by the Celts about two thousand years ago. Back then, November first was celebrated as the new year, and Halloween or Samhein was a celebration the day prior. Well, it was more of a ritual really. 

The Celts believed that on the transition of October thirty-first and November first, summer ended and it was the beginning of the new age.  The age of dark and cold days, where there would be nothing to harvest, all the crops would die and people would struggle to keep their tummies full and bodies warm. And so this day was associated with nothing other than death.

October thirty-first was also believed to be the day on which night, the boundary between the world of the dead and the world of the living became blurred. People believed that on this specific day, ghosts of the dead returned back to earth and roamed their cities, their streets.

In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, the Celts believed that the presence of otherworldly spirits made it easier for the druids and Celtic priests to predict the future. To commemorate the event, druids built sacred bonfires where people gathered to burn crops and animals as a sacrifice to the Celtic deities.

That's when the costumes come to play. During the celebration, Celts wore costumes that consisted of animal skin and heads, a little brutal for my taste, and attempted to predict each other's future.

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.

By meshing the beliefs of different European ethnic groups and the Indians, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge.

Slowly but surely, the superstitious and religious overtones of the original Halloween were lost. And that's how the initial religious holiday that came by the name of Samhein became more of a commercial holiday.

No one cared about druids, fortune-telling or the deities anymore. Heck, half if not more of the American population didn't even know where their favorite holiday originated from.

Instead of lighting bonfires, we grabbed our plastic little pumpkin buckets and walked door to door to ask for candy. I didn't mind the change at all though. I mean, could you imagine that the cute dog Francis your neighbor had would suddenly be used as your creepy neighbors' Halloween' costume? Bye-bye Francis.

Going trick-or-treating was definitely less gruesome and barbaric. I get it was a tradition and the times were different, but yuck. Besides, what if someone didn't have a dog but a fish for instance? What did they do with that poor thing?

Yeah, kids going around the neighborhood dressed as movie characters, animals or in one of those weird last-minute costumes most fathers seemed to adore, was definitely more pleasant. I often found myself wishing, I grew up here.

Going out with friends and getting tons of candy for free? A dream come true if you ask me. Even though I was quite worried about the safety of those children. What if that neighbor with that pedophile looking mustache told you to hop on into his white truck where he stored all the candy. Or what if Susan next door who hated your kid's guts for being 'too loud' decided to poison them. There are a lot of sickos out there.

Maybe pumpkin carving was the safer option...or maybe not. Imagine a ten-year-old with a big ass knife. I'd fucking lose my shit if I saw Chucky waving at me with his knife from across the street. Hell no.

But kids seemed to enjoy it anyways. Who cared about one finger right? You had nine more. So what you lost a thumb while trying to carve out a perfect triangle.