Tuesday, October 12, 2004

All Hallow's Eve

This post could prove perilously long, since I love Halloween so much. I say that understanding that many a Mormon may not look forward, as I do and have since I was eight or so, to a time of year when people dress up as ghouls, witches, vampires, pirates and so forth, and pull pranks, get sick on candy, etc. Granted, I'm a middle-of-the-road monster, and don't like to celebrate Halloween by making anyone else miserable, so I avoid the more dastardly and destructive pranks ---(the best kind are harmless, even helpful)---but I solemnize the mythological milieu of a holiday that began w/ a belief in the rising of the dead.

As a boy, I would look forward to the book fair but only because I wanted to get books like Daniel Cohen's Famous Ghosts or juvenile anthologies like Southern-Fried Rat and other Gruesome Tales. When Ghostbusters came out, though I was but a wee one,---(I love the word wee!) I would incessantly draw (poorly) pictures of phantoms, fiends, etc. and hand them to my mother in the hopes that we would go. And my obsession w/ the macabre, at least in its most innocent incarnation, still thrives, especially at this time of year.

I only recently learned that it was an innate interest in mythology that had spurned interests I would later have in comic books, science fiction, and most movies.

So, it is with a particular zeal that I dream of completely decorating my house someday in the terror-filled trappings of All Hallow's Eve. A fabulously abbreviated history of the holiday by the History Channel, no less, can be found here:
http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/halloween/ (You'll have to cut & paste because the "Insert Link" item doesn't work w/ me---accursed technology!)

Anyway, I'm not feeling witty or whimsy, so I'd better stop writing.

5 comments:

  1. I'm going to be a purple sheet for Halloween. I always come up with the coolest costumes :)

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  2. Sad to hear it, Sabi. Sweets are always a swell consolation prize!
    And purple sheets are definitely the spookiest of ghouls. No doubt you'll not need to worry about any troublesome spirits come All Hallow's Eve. :)
    I'll be sexy for Halloween. Hahah! I'm just going to leave that out there . . . no explanation.

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  3. I'm just going with the purple sheet thing because my mom bought us a purple sheet while she was out here. It seemed like a good idea. But I was going to be a mummy last year until Halloween itself, then I turned out dressing up as Princess Peach. So who knows what will happen this year.

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  4. Let me guess, you're going as sexy this Halloween, too! Woot! We'll form a club and have our own message boards, and a spiffy clan title when we play CoD . . .er, nevermind.

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  5. What, uhh, if I decided to be slightly invisible for Halloween instead?

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