Did you know, today is Friday….the Thirteenth…
There is a lot to be afraid of, which, as the psalmist said in Morning Prayer today, should make us ever more cry out for help, but there are also a lot of annoying things to complain about. My singular complaint for today is that I’m sick of Halloween. It hasn’t even happened and yet I am sick of it. Six ways of seven have I had enough.
One
In a nutshell, or a candied apple, I have had enough of Halloween to the same degree that I have had enough of Christmas. It isn’t my personal problem. It isn’t that I hate fun times and doing fun things. It is that America is mired in in the quicksand of what, I guess, must be called accelerationism, or whatever it is when you have to keep pushing and pushing to make more of what you already have (money) at such an unconsidered rate that you end up filling up all the landfills in the entire world. It’s that business of turning the day after Thanksgiving into a shopping day, which means that pretty soon Thanksgiving itself is the time to shop for Christmas, and then before you know it, stores are putting their Christmas ornaments in amongst their school supply displays. Because there is nothing to do but by more junk, America’s temples force the skelatal remains of each Holy Day to begin long long long before it is time.
Two
The way it works, practically, is that in mid-September, all the houses around me—or as many of them to make taking a pre-dawn walk a jarring spectacle of ugly horror—are festooned with increasingly sophisticated Halloween paraphernalia. It used just to be orange lights, and maybe some fake headstones and yellow tape. Each year of the last five, though, has worked itself into a near frenzy of paganism. This year there are skeletons, monster dead babies with fangs, huge blowup vampires, leering pumpkins, ghosts, ten-foot spiders, hanging witches…I could go on but I don’t like any of this stuff and listing it out makes me twitchy.
On November First all of it will disappear, replaced by blowup snowmen and snowdrifts of Christmas-esque stuff that I will trudge by until December 26 when all of that will disappear and be replaced by the junk from the Valentine’s Day bin.
Three
What this means is that there are no holidays in America. By the time you get to the special day, you are sick of it and just want it to go away. Through no fault of anyone except Satan, all the actual feasting has been transformed into a strange fast, an always Halloween but never All Saints Day, always Christmas and never Advent—or something like that. Instead of the astonished delight of a tree appearing, like magic, at the crucial and awe-striking moment, or the wee ghostie sweeping across the path when you least expect it, the American Feast is a matter of storage bins replete with the decaying remains of once spiritually laden joy, exaltation, astonishment, and salvation.
Four
I can hear you, the Reader, protesting that everyone does celebrate all these things. In fact, by putting out the decorations six weeks early, the time for rejoicing is extended, not thrown away.
Five
It’s just that I don’t believe you. It is true that a good feast requires preparation, the kind that takes thought, planning, and gumption. But one essential part of preparation is anticipation, and the best way to anticipate something is not to have it yet.
Cast your mind over all the little children trudging to school in the foggy October dawn, week after week staring at those horrible, ghoulish babies that would be really alarming and, indeed, exciting on October 31 when, confused yet delighted, the tender, toddling superhero or princess has to wrestle with the delicious fear of racing past them to get to the warmth and light of the door and the fun grownup giving out sweets. When you see them every morning, though, and on the way home after a long day, it turns out that your parent really does have to shove you into your costume and then drag you around the neighborhood and through various church parking lots.
There’s no magic when you put all the junk out in September. It spoils the fun.
Six
And, for real, it makes Satan too banal. I don’t think we should all be super afraid of the Devil, but he does exist, and it’s not a consequenceless activity to festoon your house with all his favorite things for an entire six weeks. One night might be useful for purposes of mockery, a good time to make fun of all the forces of wickedness that rebel against God. But Six Weeks?? That’s not making fun, that’s turning him and his demons into part of your furniture.
Seven
The thing about a Feast, really, is that it reveals the properties of God who gives only good things. Part of his goodness is that he always increases the suspense by only giving his gifts when you think you can’t bear waiting anymore. It is only when you discover you are perishing from thirst or fear or pain that you cry out for help and your eyes are suddenly opened and you see that he was always there, making you alive by his own life. Satan hates this, obviously, and so he has duped the West into building a graveyard of plastic that only mimics the real eternally beautiful things instead of letting any of us have them.
So anyway, get off my lawn. Have a nice day!
If I display a skull, it's just to say Memento Mori.
This is full of little shards of brilliance, Anne! I love, "always Christmas and never Advent". And this is great: "But one essential part of preparation is anticipation, and the best way to anticipate something is not to have it yet."
I've given a bit of consideration to this subject, and have written two relevant poems. Here they are, for the benefit of your Reader:
https://hotrodanglican.blogspot.com/2011/12/beat-frequency-christmas-in-october.html
https://hotrodanglican.blogspot.com/2012/02/poem-for-saint-valentines-day.html