Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.

Trick or Treat?

Halloween postcard, ca. 1900-1910.

Kevin Kenny

Halloween is a Celtic festival, imported to America, and later re-exported to Europe, pumpkins and all.

The word Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Evening—the eve of All Hallows Day (or all Saints Day) Day. October 31 tends to be a boisterous occasion, whether in Boston (even without the World Series) or in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, where it kicks off the festival of el dia de los muertos.

In the Christian calendar, All Hallows Day, on November 1, was the day to remember saints and martyrs. All Souls Day, on November 2, was dedicated to all the departed faithful awaiting entry into heaven and hence in need of prayer.

As with most Christian holidays, the Church carefully overlaid the “days of the dead” on top of an earlier pre-Christian festival. Just as Christmas marks the winter solstice and Easter the onset of spring, Halloween was timed to coincide with a Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest.

The Protestant English overlaid a different holiday on the old harvest festival. They celebrated, and continue to celebrate, Guy Fawkes Night, the anniversary of a foiled attempt to blow up parliament on November 5, 1605. This holiday caught on in colonial New England, where Halloween was not widely celebrated until the onset of mass Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century.

Happy Halloween

Miniature of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th at Cockington Green.

Steven Cromack

Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980)—both more than thirty years old—are now America’s classic horror movies. Why do they enjoy such prominence in American culture? The answer rests in the content of their plots and the context in which they were produced. 

John Carpenter’s Halloween catapulted the slasher film into American culture with its release in 1978. In 1974, before he made A Christmas Story, director Bob Clark made Black Christmas, a story of young adults alone in a secluded area, ready to be terrorized, an all but standard plot line in horror movies today. But Halloween’s central character Michael Myers was something new. He was not just a serial killer, but one who stalked his victims with creepy music in the background. And he was seemingly indestructible. Never before had such a character existed in cinema. Not too long after Halloween came Friday the 13th, another movie about an indestructible evil being that slaughters all in its path.

A Graveyard Smash

Randall Stephens

Forget the Pixie Sticks and Apples. (Like handing out grenades after the candy scares of yesteryear.) Make sure to have plenty of sealed candy bars, gum, blow pops, and the like. Tonight, hungry super-excited kids, with moms and dads in tow, will roam the streets outfitted as dogs, clowns, vampires, Richard Simmonses, zombies, and Abraham Lincoln zombies.

For a little on the history of the celebration. I quote here from a great read, Nicholas Rogers's, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford, 2002.):

"'Samhain and the Celtic Origins of Halloween': Halloween is commonly thought to have pagan origins, even though its etymology is Christian. Halloween is, quite literally, the popular derivative of All Hallow Even, or the eve of All Saints' Day (1 November). Taken together with All Souls' Day, which falls on 2 November, it is a time assigned in the Christian calendar for honoring the saints and the newly departed. . . .

In marking the onset of winter, Samhain was closely associated with darkness and the supernatural. In Celtic lore, winter was the dark time of the year when 'nature is asleep, summer has returned to the underworld, and the earth is desolate and inhospitable. In Cornwall and Brittany, November was known as the dark or black month, the first of winter; in Scotland, it was called 'an Dudlachd' or 'gloom.' Samhain was a time of divine couplings and dark omens, a time when malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops" (Rogers 11, 20).

How we got from that enchanted view of the world and all its seasonal rituals to kids dressed as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or teens decked out as their favorite character on Jersey Shore, is a fascinating, odd, winding tale of cultural history.