Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday. It’s also “Devil’s Night” as it was called back where and when I grew up. I don’t know if anyone still calls it that. Nor do I know whether it’s still a night on which some people set fire to things in “celebration”.
I never did quite understand that tendency. Well, no, actually I completely understand the urge to burn things, but I don’t understand giving oneself license to burn things that belong to other people, just because it’s the day before Halloween.
Of course, one could just call today Halloween Eve, but when you break down the etymology that doesn’t quite work. Halloween is already “short” for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the day before what I think is called The Feast of All Saints, or just All Saints’ Day. I guess that must be celebrated on November 1st, since Halloween is October 31st, but I have no idea how it’s traditionally celebrated by those who celebrate it.
Are there people who actually celebrate it? There probably are such people.
I guess I get the progression: on Halloween, the ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves parade around, before the ascendancy of “good” the next day in the form of all the nutbars who have been declared “saints”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were some fine people who have been made saints, but most of the ones of whom I’ve heard were pretty clearly just people who were mentally ill. However, their society was not prepared actually to help them in any way, so they called them holy people. I guess it’s (usually) better than what happened to the people who were mentally ill but were seen to be possessed or to be witches or warlocks or what have you.
Mind you, they’re all dead now, and they would have been dead pretty much no matter what, so I guess it doesn’t matter to them what sorts of nonsense people have imagined about them.
Getting back to the holiday progression, I think the addition of Devil’s Night on the night before Halloween makes some sense and improves the mythology. By that reading, on October 30th, the Devil is truly ascendant, and there is no flouncing about in silly costumes (well, there is, but not “officially”) just acts of destruction. Then, on the 31st, regular people dress up as creatures of the night, to turn the tables on beings that live by causing fear (much as Batman is said to do!) and run them out of town—to Hell, presumably*. And then, once the ordinary people have done the work of driving off evil, the saints can come marching in and pretend to be the source of the goodness, when it’s really just that bad things have been driven off (by ordinary people choosing not to be afraid of them).
That’s my highly editorialized take on things, anyway. But, whatever.
This is usually my favorite time of year, and Halloween is certainly my favorite big general holiday. I don’t really have any plans to celebrate it this year, though. I’m not going to be giving out candy—I live in the rear room of the house, anyway—and I don’t mean to dress up or do anything celebratory otherwise tonight or tomorrow (alas, I plan to set no fires). Like the rest of the landscape of time before me, this patch is dreary and boggy and gray and a bit smelly. And there’s just dull mist ahead.
By the way, I think I’m going to do the same thing today that I did yesterday and set my initial goal for this post as 701 words, which I’ve almost reached already as I write this. I will almost surely pass it, but not by too much. I think it worked well, yesterday, though not as well as whatever I did the day before, when for unknown reasons I saw a huge spike in the number of people who came and saw my blog. Perhaps that was because I not only invited people to like it and share it, but actually bolstered that by sharing my song Like and Share**.
What would happen if I shared by song Breaking Me Down? Let’s see. I’ll embed it below, and we’ll see how successfully I’ll be digested or otherwise broken down today.
In the meantime, please have a good Devil’s Day or whatever.
TTFN
*As Dave Barry pointed out, that’s in concourse D at O’Hare International Airport, which frequent travelers will know.
**Maybe it was sharing the Ricochet Racers that did it, triggering nostalgia in members of Generation X. It’s possible.
Robert Elessar 