61 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
61 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
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I AIN'T SCARED OF NO GHOST
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By M.L. Verb
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Halloween arrived on schedule this year, only three or four months after
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trick-or-treat candy first appeared in the stores, and right in the middle of
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the Christmas shopping season.
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I used to like Halloween. But that was back when there wasn't much to be
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afraid of except polio and Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president. We conquered
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polio.
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Today, however, it's getting harder and harder to see the purpose of
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Halloween. Today there's already enough stuff to scare us. Why do we need
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ghosts and witches and big ugly kids pounding on our front door engaging in that
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honored American custom, extortion?
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Back when Halloween started folks took most of this spooky spirit stuff more
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seriously than we do today. More than 2,000 years ago, before they were into
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NBA basketball, the Celtic people held the forerunner of our Halloween,
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something called an annual festival of Samhain to honor the Celtic lord of
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death.
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The Celtic new year began on Nov. 1 (much later to be known as All Saint's
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Day), and the celebration marked the start of the cold, dark, dead time of year.
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The Celts believed that Lord Samhain allowed the souls of dead people to
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return to earth on the evening of the festival.
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The Druids, too, got into this act. They were the Celts' priests and
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teachers, which explains a lot. The Druids dreamed up the wonky idea of
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ordering the people to put out their hearth fires at Samhain festival time. The
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people did it. This inclination of people to do crazy stuff dreamed up by their
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gurus is one of the traits the Celts and Druids passed down to the present.
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Thanks, jerks.
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Anyway, here were all these Celts shivering around in the dark waiting for all
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souls to screech through the air. It was awful, especially for those who may
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have suspected that electricity wouldn't be discovered for almost 2,000 more
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years and that light bulbs and the Rural Electrification Administration were
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several years further away than that. No wonder Halloween scared the togas off
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them.
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Today people only pretend to be scared of the alleged ghosts and goblins, but
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those things can't hold a candle to the real frights loose in the world.
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Want to bob for apples? Fine, just make sure the apples aren't covered with
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carinogenic pesticides and that the water isn't acid rain. Want to go
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trick-or-treating? It can be fun if your costume doesn't blind you as you cross
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the street in front of a speeding car. Or if someone doesn't slip a razor blade
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in your apple or drugs in your candy.
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The Celts and Druids may have stood around their cold quenched hearths shaking
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with fright about seeing the neon-blue spirit of Uncle Drambuie come whipping
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around the corner. But we bet they never had to take their candy to a hospital
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to be X-rayed before eating it.
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Maybe that's why spirits from the dead don't seem to come around much any
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more. It's probably a lot safer and less frightening where they are.
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