Halloween Celebrations in Modern Times
Halloween in modern, western society is a grisly yet anticipated spectacle. It’s a spectacle because different communities, groups and individuals celebrate it differently. Since the nineties, people have relinquished aged beliefs about the supposed ‘Satanism’ of modern Halloween.
Why Celebrate Halloween?
How come people celebrate Halloween? Despite the many different sectors in the Christian religion, the modern beliefs of Halloween is basically centered on death; it’s the most feared element in Halloween.
Halloween deals with all the negative energies linked to human life. Sickness, hunger, death and war are just some of these energies. Fear may take many forms, but people create mechanisms like Halloween to control these forces without really having to touch them.
Costumes and Halloween parties
This is the reason why people often watch scary Hollywood releases during the Halloween season, and why children wear costumes in school parties. It’s a way for people to confront seemingly uncontrollable forces, to make these forces less frightening.
Playing historical characters like generals, submarine commanders and firefighters, or wearing costumes of ghouls and ghosts twists reality for a short time of the year.
Hollywood films
Movies like the Chainsaw Texas Massacre, Saw, Saw II and Autopsy all play with the idea of people going beyond the pale of the normal to explore what it would be like to kill and to evade capture.
For some reason, the appearance of Hollywood versions of what is frightening and what should be feared has had little effect on how people generally celebrate Halloween.
So what was the effect of Hollywood on people? Unfortunately, it seems that Hollywood has had a numbing effect on people. People simply no longer care what they see; that’s why the most recent horror flicks focus more on gore to lead people out of their seeming passivity in the face of death and horror.
What About The Kids?
With all these scary get-ups consisting of ghouls and ghosts, how do your kids appreciate what is beyond the world we’re living in? Kids usually don’t get to experience personal loss, death or even horror, which makes Halloween look like a superficial commemoration.
Unlike the Yuletide season, which is often associated with warmth and family, Halloween seems to be that ‘spark’ near the end of the year when people were allowed to be keener to the unseen than normal.
Halloween is that time of the year where children get to ask “Do ghosts really exist?” The diversity of how Halloween is celebrated in every culture is incredible. Suspicions arising about existence of ghosts originated from Halloween itself. So, the question goes: Why celebrate it if it does not even exist?
Overall, Halloween seems to be a sort of inverted reflection of Christianity. There are many things in the Christian faith that can’t fully be explained, and these mysteries are somehow tackled and explained during Halloween — even if the explanations may vary widely and never be conclusive.
Despite the unknown, Halloween is still an opportunity for people to take a break from everyday life and ponder the deeper things in life — and what waits afterwards.
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