How Halloween Is Celebrated Today
Jul 4th, 2009 by Benedict Fisher
In modern Western societies today, Halloween is a spooky yet very much-awaited event. Many different communities and groups celebrate it differently. Halloween has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 90’s, when people stopped seeing it as “Satanic.”
Why Celebrate Halloween?
How come people celebrate Halloween? Despite the many different sectors in the Christian religion, the modern beliefs of Halloween is basically centered on death; it’s the most feared element in Halloween.
Death is associated with all the bad things in human life, such as sickness, hunger, and war. But these components undergo a strange inversion during Halloween. People get to “take control” of them, even without going through them.
Horror-themed Costumes And Parties
This is why people love dressing up as spooky creatures during parties and watching scary movies during Halloween. They love the idea of controlling the otherwise uncontrollable forces in life, making them more acceptable and less scary.
People wear costumes representing ghosts, witches, ghouls, zombies, and historical characters to twist reality for a single night, making the misunderstood very human and very fun. It doesn’t seem to matter if the inversions don’t make sense.
Hollywood movies
Movies like the Chainsaw Texas Massacre, Saw, Saw II and Autopsy all play with the idea of people going beyond the pale of the normal to explore what it would be like to kill and to evade capture.
But surprisingly, Hollywood movies don’t seem to affect the way people celebrate Halloween. In fact, they don’t seem to affect people’s sensibilities much at all.
So what was the effect of Hollywood on people? Unfortunately, it seems that Hollywood has had a numbing effect on people. People simply no longer care what they see; that’s why the most recent horror flicks focus more on gore to lead people out of their seeming passivity in the face of death and horror.
And the kids?
How do kids appreciate death, ghosts and the world beyond our world? For individuals who are not yet teenagers, or who have not yet experienced personal loss, death or horror, Halloween appears to be a purely superficial celebration.
Where the Yuletide season celebrates warmth and family, Halloween is celebrated close to the year’s end where people are more enthusiastic in commemorating the unseen than what is normal.
Halloween is that time of the year where children get to ask “Do ghosts really exist?” The diversity of how Halloween is celebrated in every culture is incredible. Suspicions arising about existence of ghosts originated from Halloween itself. So, the question goes: Why celebrate it if it does not even exist?
Overall, Halloween seems to be a sort of inverted reflection of Christianity. There are many things in the Christian faith that can’t fully be explained, and these mysteries are somehow tackled and explained during Halloween — even if the explanations may vary widely and never be conclusive.
Despite the unknown, Halloween is still an opportunity for people to take a break from everyday life and ponder the deeper things in life — and what waits afterwards.
