Snug Harbor gathers itself in anticipation of Halloween number two at our new home out in the sticks. Black and orange pumpkin flags flap in the breeze from their poles on the Spook1 Weather Station, bright vanguards of the coming dark circus. At night passersby may notice that our front windows glow a great deal more orange lately, and the sounds of construction whirring and pounding out of Spooky Blue’s shop last long into the night.

However, in the midst of this bustling activity flits a mosquito. Its whine is persistent, and it sounds like “pagan holiday”, “witchcraft”, and “dark side“. Some folks are so frightened of Halloween and its symbols that they simply can’t tolerate them, instead gathering together in church basements to wait out the devil, relieved when it’s finally over with and they can go home and clear a spot for the Christmas tree.

Other folks take some personal responsibility to remind revelers that what we’re doing is fundamentally wrong. Sometimes it’s a friendly note in the mailbox from a neighbor, or possibly a concerned uncle drops by to talk about Leviticus 19:31. Still others might take things a step further and resort to good old-fashioned vandalism.

While vandals and Halloween have entertwining and often entertaining histories that are worth exploring, let’s save it for another time. Are the fears of the Leviticussers justified? Is Halloween evil? I submit that if one’s intent is not evil, then his actions cannot be evil.

Our version of Halloween has been renamed and repackaged many times over the long centuries. Scary sounding people and gods and religions were involved: Druids, Pagans, Samhain. All this Druiding and Paganizing made a lot of Christians angry, not least of whom was the Pope, who endeavored to put a stop to it, and not by means of a friendly letter in the post. Over time and under oppression, their misbehavior settled into a quiet passive-aggressive kind of sedition that remains to this day, though most people don’t know why they’re being seditious and would likely argue the fact, which brings me back to one of my two points. If one’s intent is not evil, then his actions cannot be evil.

Is Halloween steeped with pagan rituals? Sure, why not. Tons of new pagan children are doubtless drafted every October by dressing up as Spiderman or Optimus Prime and going out trick-or-treating. Is Halloween filled with symbolism that glorifies witchcraft, necromancy, casting – um lots, er… frisbeetarianism, and Druiding? Now we get to the meat of this discussion. Certainly we recognize symbols like the witch, a ghost, a bat, and a pumpkin as belonging to Halloween. But what do these represent?

That is the real point. To me they represent … Halloween! Not the other way around. The profile of the witch cut from construction paper and hung in the window is dear to me. It takes me back to fun afternoons that my mother and I spent together making witches and ghosts and pumpkins and bats to hang all over the house with bits of masking tape. A cardboard cutout skeleton on a front door reminds me of a cold rainy morning walking through the doors of S. Ellen Jones Elementary School and gazing up at the big bulletin board by the front office covered with crayon-colored leaves and guarded by that same tall, grinning, cardboard skeleton.

A construction paper witch hanging in my window isn’t a license to promote, advocate, ballyhoo, implement, transact, or otherwise do witchery of any sort. It is a symbol of Halloween and represents something entirely different to me. See what I just did? The witch, like the bat, black cat, skeleton, and Jackolantern are all symbols, objects that as a whole represent the abstraction of Halloween. My Halloween isn’t necessarily someone else’s Halloween. That’s what an abstraction means, and there’s where the trouble starts.

Round about and back again to the original question: Is Halloween evil? The simple answer is: No more so than we make it. In other words, a watermelon isn’t evil because a miscreant spits seeds all over the front porch. Halloween is wrapping yourself up in an autumn quilt and sharing the warmth with your friends and family. If folks can’t understand why all this sharing has to be carried out with the help of paper mache zombies and pumpkins, then I have to wonder if they ever had any fun as kids, or if something ate up all their sense of humor later in life. In any case, if Halloween means something different to them than to me, then that’s their business.

Here’s a final question with meat on its bones. Does Halloween glorify God? You tell me. Share, warmth, family, friendship. Those words all sound a lot like “Love”.

Happy Halloween!

— S. Blue will be on vacation the week of Sep. 24.
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Category: Halloween  

If you sawed your old pal Spooky in half you’d count 40 rings. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Harvest Homecoming street festival in New Albany, Indiana. I think there’s a certain harmony in that. Every year leading up to the big event, the buzz at S. Ellen Jones Elementary School was intense. “I heard that some kid got stuck upside down in the Rocko-plane. Oh yeah? I heard that Frankenstein walks around an’ catches kids an’ takes ’em back to the haunted house an’ he eats ’em! Nuh-uhhh!” I was introduced to a lot of my favorite things for the first time at the Harvest Homecoming. Parades with big firetrucks and Shriners in little cars, candy buckeyes, peanut butter fudge, buffalo burgers, corndogs drowned in mustard, a clown walking an invisible dog, five pop-gun shots for a quarter, the duck pond where you were guaranteed a spider ring or a rubber skeleton, billowing clouds of grilled chicken smoke, shop windows painted with ghosts and bats, my very first wad of cotton candy, and rides. Rides! I called my favorite ride simply The Cars. You’ve seen them. Little corvettes going round and round in a circle under a big umbrella. Back then there was a button on the steering wheel or the dash that sounded a buzzer. “Maaak aaak aak aaak aaak!” Five of my top 10 memories are of my brother Brian and his wife Kathy picking me up after school to go ride The Cars and the Tilt-a-Whirl, and Scrambler, and a sort of parachute-tower affair where I got a certificate because I jumped so many times. In a couple of weeks a parade of firetrucks, marching bands, floats, politicians, thunderous old dunebuggies, older but no less thunderous Shriners, and all the rest will wind through the streets of New Albany again, just like they’ve done every year since forever ago, proving that you really can come home again.

Thanks to Daiv Stoner, Stephen Lutz, and the New Albany Free Public Library Image Archive for use of the photos.
Harvest Homecoming home page & schedule of events

Category: Halloween  

The masks scratched the corners of your eyes, your nostrils, and the sides of your mouth. Their colors were so super saturated that they would spontaneously combust if you walked under a black light.You couldn’t see through the eye holes, and if you didn’t wander into a bus or walk off a cliff, there was a good chance that the hot condensation wetting your face was going to precipitate a mild rash.Yet in spite of it all, it was an utter thrill every year to see the boxes with their clear cellophane start to appear on the shelves at Ben Franklin. I’m not quite old enough to have written, “at the Ben Franklin”, but close enough.Collegeville, Ben Cooper, Halco, Magic-Glo, and Wonderland manufactured cheap plastic and vinyl Halloween costumes from the 1950s through the late ’70s, and every kid who ever raced down the Halloween aisle of a Kmart or quietly prowled through the rows of forlorn dust covered boxes at the back of the Ben Franklin had exactly two opinions of these things. The first was that they were contemptible; a terrible abuse of the spirit of Halloween. Why would you wear an Ultraman costume that is covered with pictures of Ultraman? It should be all silver with a picture of that blue flashy thingy on the chest, not emblazoned with Ultraman Protector of the world! I mean really! When I put on the costume, I am Ultraman, not a billboard advertising Ultraman! As was evidenced by the cosistently large numbers of these things sold year after year, the second and possibly more dominant opinion was simply, “Hey, Ultraman. Cool!” I fell somewhere in between. It could be argued that one’s Halloween costume is the essence of Halloween itself. Certainly a poor choice in costume or just plain rotten luck, Charlie Brown’s muddled ghost for example, could seriously dampen spirits on halloween night, but when it really came down to it, you could put up with a lot and still have a great time. How else was it possible for companies to pawn these atrocious and yet wonderful little nightmares on kids across the US? It boils down to one thing. They knew how crazy we were. They could slap “flame retardant” on the cover and satisfy our parents. Everything else just sort of blended together for the most part. We were much more picky, and woe to the kid whose mom picked out his costume for him. – Here’s your costume, Billy. – But momm, I wanna be Ace Frehley! – You’ll be no such thing! Don’t you know that KISS stands for Knights in Satan’s Service? – But…but…is this Pluto? From Mickey Mouse? – Oh, it’s cute! You’ll be just adorable! I was sooooo lucky not to be that kid. You remember him. The quiet boy dressed as Raggedy Andy. He went through all the motions, still managed a muffled “trig-er-tree” at every house, even collected as much candy as the rest of us, but you could just tell. He was dead inside. My costume varied over the years. I remember being Spiderman and a ghost and a crocodile ghost among other things. The store-bought costumes weren’t without their charms, but I much preferred to make my own out of this and that. Of course, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t linger at the Halloween display and gaze upon row after row of fantastic faces glaring, grinning, snearing, leering back at me. In fact, that hasn’t changed much in 30 years. Like sex and to a lesser degree pizza, Halloween under a scratchy sweaty mask is still Halloween.

Category: Halloween  

You are a bold and courageous person. Afraid of nothing. High on a hilltop near your home there stands a dilapidated old mansion. Some say the place is haunted, but you don’t believe in such myths. One dark and stormy night a light appears in the topmost window in the tower of the old house. You decide to investigate. …And you never return!

Due to some past brain wreck, I can’t reliably recall the word for the place where we store our noodles and soup (the pantry), but I can flawlessly recite the opening oratory from track one of Disney’s Chilling Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House.

In fact, I can clearly recall a day some 31 years past. For some inexplicable reason the scent of marshmallows filled the air as a nine-year-old me happily copied the above album cover with poster paints onto the huge picture windows on the front of our house. It was spitting rain, but I was dry on the wide front porch. My fingers were freezing!

Lots of downtown businesses had their windows painted by school kids for the Harvest Homecoming street fair/carnival, and I wanted in on it. I never got to paint those windows, but mom and dad let me completely cover our front windows with pictures of ghosts and graveyards and the best picture of a haunted house I had ever seen; that on the cover of my worn out Chilling Thrilling Sounds LP.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I listened to that old record, scrunched down in front of the stereo in the corner of the living room next to the big green vinyl recliner, the continuous hiss and pop now so familiar that it was practically part of the soundtrack. Intellectually I knew that the ghost in the hallway was just a sheet that I myself draped over the coat rack. But when that horrible Disney banshee howled “oohoo – oowaaAAAAaaaahhruu! Oohoo – oowaaAAAaaahhrrrruuuuhhhhh!!!”, you bet I was hiding under whatever was handy. Terrifying. Wonderful!

You still hear bits of “cat fight” and “thunder lightning and rain” on the radio and tv even today. Usually as a backdrop for a spot about the local Jaycee’s haunted house. Some things really do never change, and for that I think I’ll always be grateful.

Incidentally, the alternate word for pantry in our house is the “food garage”.

Haunted Dimensions – Tribute to Chilling Thrilling Sounds
MP3s – I figure it’s fair use if you have the album already
Here’s a special treat – 1979 Chilling Thrilling Sounds

Category: Halloween