Halloween Celebrations in Modern Times
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
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?
Why do people celebrate Halloween, anyway? If we are to look at the Christian belief systems of today (we speak of many because the Christian religion is split into many sects and groups), the most feared component of the whole ‘deal’ is still death.
All the negative forces associated with living a human life like sickness, death, hunger and war all experience confluence in Halloween. The fear of these things might take different forms, but nonetheless, it’s a way for people to take control of these elements without really touching them.
Costumes and horror 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.
Halloween Hollywood Releases
Chainsaw Texas Massacre, Saw, Saw II and Autopsy are popular movies that play the idea of going beyond what’s normal to show the audience what it would look like to kill or 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.
Instead of influencing the people, Hollywood actually does the opposite — it NUMBS them to the issues behind Halloween. People no longer seem to care what they watch on the movie screen. This is why most of today’s horror movies deal with gore — it’s the easiest way to scare people and look at death more seriously.
Halloween and Kids
How do kids appreciate death, ghosts and the world beyond our world? For individuals who are not yet teenagers, or who have not yet experienced personal loss, death or horror, Halloween appears to be a purely superficial celebration.
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.
It’s not surprising to hear children ask, “Do ghosts really exist?” during Halloween. The answers they get may vary between cultures, but the suggestion that they DO exist come from Halloween. After all, there’s no reason to celebrate something that doesn’t exist!
After everything, commemoration of this event becomes an inverted belief to those of Christianity. The twisted reality of what’s not known, can’t be seen, or can’t be understood based on Christianity belief is probably justified with celebrations such as Halloween. Occurrences of such events vary and descriptions may be a bit confusing.
Thus, the celebration of Halloween is a way of celebrating what can’t be explained by the general concept of life, death, and in between.
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