Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us.

It’s an invocation, learned sometime in my youth, that now comes to mind as lawns fill up with tombstones, skeletons, cobwebs, ghosts and witches in the days before Halloween.

I don’t share the sentiments of one friend who confided about her decorating, “Oh, the macabre, it just seems to cheer me up!” The creepier trappings of Halloween seem to do just the opposite to me.

What’s so vivifying about turning your front yard into a languishing graveyard, your home into a dungeon lounge for a convocation of baleful creatures?

One early October as I walked through my neighborhood, I came to a home where a woman was busy planting a couple dozen fake but life-sized headstones across her lawn. As she draped them with gauzy webs and gangly black spiders, I stopped to watch and we started to chat.

What, I asked, motivated her to sink a chunk of time and money on such a display? She paused from her work, rubbed her nose and tilted her head. “I guess,” she said, after giving it some thought, “poking fun at death makes me feel like it can’t get me.”

If she wasn’t kidding me, and she didn’t seem to be, she was kidding herself. Nothing, not even ridicule, keeps death from keeping its appointment with us.

DÃa de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which shares Halloween’s motifs of graveyards and skeletons, more pointedly stares death in the face, as if to say, “Come on. I’m not scared of you.” The celebrations coincide because of their ties to the Christian observance of All Saints’ Day on the first day of November.

The name Halloween is a contraction of All Hallow Even, a now archaic name for All Saints’ Eve. In its religious context, it ushers in the day set aside -- in the Roman Catholic Church in the 8th century -- to honor all Christian saints.

Likewise, the Day of the Dead (or Days of the Dead, as the celebration is sometimes called) is bound to the Roman Catholic All Saints’ Day as well as All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. In the Roman Catholic Church, the dead remembered on All Saints’ Day are considered to be in Heaven, in immediate knowledge of God, while those remembered on All Souls’ Day are believed to be in Purgatory, a place of purification intermediate to Heaven.

The cultural customs and practices that characterize the Day of the Dead and Halloween, however, have for the most part derived from their pre-Christian associations. The origins of Halloween are believed to be in the ancient Celtic festival Samhain, and the Day of the Dead in Meso-American celebrations to remember the dead that date back at least 3,000 years.

Both anticipated the return of the dead, if only for a night.

On Samhain, it is said the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead became very thin, so thin that the souls of the dead as well as the souls of the yet unborn were able to traffic with the living. Yet in this state, it was also believed, chaos could put the order of the world in disarray.

Much like our New Year, Samhain was a time of endings and beginnings, but looking into the face of winter, it could be the beginning of considerable misfortune. Crop and animal sacrifices of appeasement, divination of what was to come, the dead and unborn walking among the living and animal-skin costumes worn to hide from malicious spirits -- all foreshadowed the customs of what we know as Halloween.

Presided over by the Lady of the Dead, the spirits of the departed were also thought to return during the Meso-American festivities devoted to the dead. But for this culture, visitations by the dead conjured no fear. Skulls used in the celebration to honor the dead symbolized death not as an end but as a rebirth.

Today the skulls of the Day of the Dead are sugar, wax, papier-mache or wood.

In their homes, families build elaborate altars, ofrendas, dedicated to their deceased loved ones. The altars are covered and surrounded with flowers, candles, incense, photographs and the favorite foods and beverages -- even cigarettes -- of the dead.

There might be streamers of purple (for sorrow), pink (for life and celebration) and white (for renewal and hope). The favorite music of the departed is played. Loved ones dance, sometimes wearing traditional wooden skull masks called calacas.

The popularity of the Day of the Dead is spreading, as is the celebration of Halloween, despite the inclination of many Protestant Christians to shun Halloween as an intrinsically evil pagan feast involving the occult.

It’s not a holiday religious Jews care to celebrate either; it’s frowned upon for them to adopt any non-Jewish holidays.

But in addition to seeing Halloween as both a pagan and Christian celebration, they, like many Christians, also find some Halloween customs contrary to Jewish teachings: the trick-or-treat demand for sweets made to strangers; the building of bonfires (in ancient times to ward of evil spirits); the practices of fortune-telling rooted in Halloween’s pre-Christian traditions.

But lately other religious traditions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, have embraced Halloween, not that they incorporate the aspects of the holiday that Jews and Christians find objectionable.

The West Covina Buddhist Temple has celebrated Halloween with a costume party and children’s games (like the old-fashioned musical chairs and the more original “eat the doughnut quickly without chewing if possible”) and games for kids of all ages (including its religious leaders) such as a pie-eating contest.

Farther away in Atlanta, Ga., the Rameshori Buddhist Center has enjoyed Halloween as a combined costume party and fundraiser where everyone came dressed as their “favorite delusion” -- for example, anger, pride or attachment.

At least some Buddhists think they share a belief in rebirth and the indestructibility of the mind with the ancient Celtic priests, the Druids.

The online edition of India’s national newspaper, The Hindu, once listed local Halloween celebrations with an announcement that, after summarizing its pre-Christian and Christian associations, concluded, “After all, the day itself is only as evil as one care to make it.”

Ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night aside, I think they’ve got a point.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.

20051027gzerqeke(LA)