"First, Kill the Witches. Then, Celebrate Them."

"Insofar as we can chart its murky origins, Halloween derives from Samhain, an ancient Celtic harvest festival. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried its otherworldly imagery to America, largely in the mid-19th century. Black cats arrived along with their broomstick-flying consorts in the 1890s. The witches’ origin is unknown; they played no role in the Celtic tradition. The costumes came later, as did the witches’ basic black. Trick-or-treating began in the 1920s. The candy companies saw to the rest.

That the least decorous, most disorderly of holidays should have established permanent residence in eastern Massachusetts is incongruous on any number of counts. Our Puritan forefathers had a horror of holidays. They renounced even saints days, to wind up with a calendar that has been described as “the dullest in Western civilization.” They feared that boatloads of nefarious Christmas-celebrating Irishmen were to disembark imminently on American shores. They were off by only a few centuries...

Among the oldest settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and for years among the wealthiest cities in America, Salem had many claims to fame. It preferred not to count the witchcraft delusion among them; no one cared to record even where the town had hanged 19 innocents. It addressed the unpleasantness the New England way: silently. When George Washington passed through Salem in October 1789, he witnessed neither any trace of a witch panic nor of Halloween. Sometimes it seems as if the trauma of an event can be measured by how long it takes us to commemorate it, and by how thoroughly we mangle it in the process

...

THREE HUNDRED years after the trials, Salem unveiled an elegant, understated memorial to the victims. Three hundred and thirteen years after the trials, it unveiled a gleaming statue of the “Bewitched” star, Elizabeth Montgomery, on a broom.

"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/first-kill-the-witches-then-celebrate-them.html?ref=todayspaper

Happy Halloween ;)

This is making me think about what it is that we are celebrating today. This holiday is pretty much just about fun, sort of focused on children, sort of about celebrating our own creativity and popular culture - but also loosely about expressing our myths and superstitions and all the parts of our society that belie our notions of our rationalism and modernity.  

Like, how do we choose costumes and what we are expressing when we wear them? What makes a "good costume"? I think the goal is to (a) subsume your own identity into something else, totally realistically, achieving a perfect transformation so that others can experience what it would be like to interact with that other person/thing/concept, and (b) reflect something important in the zeitgeist, like a figure who has been in the news or media, or some big concept/idea that our culture has been immersed in. Letting us directly process something important to our experiences, but too distant or abstract for us to realistically approach directly.

But then, most of us just want to fun of dressing up, finding the perfect costume is a lot of work. My costume is Misty Copeland, and I'm not sure exactly what I'm expressing my attempting to embody her. I guess I find her inspiring, it makes me feel a lot of good emotions to see her being really visible in the media right now, and I sort of want a way to express and celebrate that. (also, it's pretty simple and comfortable and she's my race and that's hard to find)