Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin King, NOW, and Always
Halloween is one of the few holidays with any real meaning. Most other holidays are based on distorted interpretations of history, if not outright myths and nonsense. Thanksgiving, for example, though sold as a celebration of togetherness and gratitude, and marketed as commemorating cooperation and friendship between Native Americans and European settler colonists, is more a ritual of gluttony, and rock salt being rubbed in the wounds of genocide. Then there’s Christmas, the celebration of a magical bastard baby who wasn’t even born on December 25th and which is only celebrated on that day because the Romans who killed him wanted it to sync up with their pagan winter solstice holidays, and which for most folks is just an exercise in excess consumerism and bad TV specials. Plus, it’s religious. Going forward, we really should scrap all religious holidays. They’re all based on fairy tales and silly shit and the people who believe in them take them way too seriously and get too competitive. It’s bad enough that we have to allow for the collective psychoses of the religious, but to allow them totemic days to build their powers and reaffirm their dedication to their mental disorders is simply imprudent. Rather than play favoritism, as we have been in the Christianity dominated world, let alone support the delusions of the mentally unwell, we’re better off getting rid of all religious holidays. Then we have holidays like Independence Day, built on hypocrisy and justified by setting off colorful, pretty explosions, or Labor Day, which is great in theory except for the fact that many if not most of the country’s labor force doesn’t even get the day off.
It’s all a mess. All holidays. Except for the one and only holiday that we can all agree is superior, inoffensive, and the most delightful. Halloween.
Halloween is meant to reign supreme in the holiday pantheon. It is the most fun and joyful holiday by far, and one of the few founded on something real: paying tribute to the dead and disguising ourselves in costumes to protect against demonic incursions striking through the borders between realms. There’s also the bit about turning children into addicts and obese diabetics on behalf of the candy industry. We should lose that part, but I know it’s a sticking point for a lot of people, many of them child corn syrup addicts, so I’ll back off on that for now. Our focus must stay on the true spirit of Halloween, the joyful part, the death and demons part.
Halloween needs to be bigger, given the space and attention it deserves. Small handfuls of plastic skeletons and cottony plastic stretched out to resemble spiderwebs are not doing the job. A few decorations on houses and businesses is not enough. Entire neighborhoods and cities must be transformed into happy Halloween hellscapes. The giddy fright and fun that we experience visiting a haunted house should be ever present in our lives in the days and weeks, if not the whole month of October, preceding Halloween. Everything should be decorated. Everyone should be in costume. All the time. One should be unable to walk one block to the next without encountering monsters, zombies, vampires, and every other avatar of horror, all of varying spookiness and sexiness.
Because of course Halloween has sexiness going for it, in addition to the fun and spookiness. Easter has no inherent sexiness. Ramadan and Yom Kipur and President’s Day, all of them are lacking badly in fun and spookiness, and quite devoid of sexiness. If all the other, lesser, holidays are determined to stick around, they’ll have to up their spook and sex quotients considerably.
For too long, Halloween has been relegated to a status far below its station. It’s chilling in the corner at the party when it should be in the center of the room, being cheered while it’s hoisted up on a chair, accompanied by Halloween themed and inspired music, which of course is drastically superior to the largely garbage music of all other holidays.
We must all do our part to celebrate Halloween, not just on the day itself, but on all days. Every day, we must keep the spirit of Halloween in our hearts. Whether in October, September, or June: HAPPY HALLOWEEN!