Hallo-Weenie

 

Hallo-Weenie

©2021 Ross Williams

I shared an office room with an extremely catholic lady for several years in the database department for the DoD contract we worked on. She was the type who believed that anything she didn't like was satanic. And she didn't like anything that contradicted her personal theology. Yoga, transcendental meditation, astrology, Halloween. Those were the topics that, once brought up in the office, would inspire a stern lecture and condemnation.

I forget what it was about yoga that made her think the devil was behind it. But I'm sure tai chi is burdened by the same evil.

Transcendental meditation is satanic because one is not praying to god as a good hypercatholic does, but is meditating in the vague and ambiguous direction of the universe, or something, and that is just so... wrong.

One day I had come back from discussing something with the database team leader. I needed a decision from him; I'm a Libra and couldn't make it myself. He failed to give me one; he was also a Libra. Libras, in the astrological personality profile, are all about weighing options and looking for more information before deciding anything. I don't accept astrology as anything more than a mindless hobby, but it is a phenomenon in the culture I live in, and so I know some of the basics.

Upon entering the room I shared with the uber-catholic I grumbled about there being too many Libras in our department. She launched into a sermon on the devil worship that is astrology, as if human destiny and salvation could be determined by the position of the sun and stars, or the phase of the moon.

A discreet time later – i.e., after lunch – I casually mentioned Easter. She took the bait. After a few minutes of idle prattling about the subject, I innocently mentioned that Easter Sunday is never the same week two years in a row, and did she know how the location of Easter Sunday is determined. She, not surprisingly, did not. So I told her.

Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Which is to say, Easter's placement on the calendar – and with it, Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Fat Tuesday and the entire rest of the Lenten schedule – are determined by the phase of the moon and the position of the sun. She blustered and bellowed and denied it all. Go ask your priest, I shrugged. Asking her priest was her universal fallback whenever some theological issue presented itself at work, like whether it was allowed to participate in the coffee fund or not. And apparently she did ask her priest, because that was the last time I, or anyone in our office, got a lecture on astrology.

Some months later I casually mentioned that modern theologians believe, given the clues and descriptions in the bible, that Joshua bar Joseph was born in the late winter or early spring. She allowed as how, yes, that was likely. I asked if she wanted to know why Christ's Mass had been entered into the calendar, then, in very early winter. She, again not surprisingly after the Easter fiasco, did not. Smart move for someone wishing to remain innocently hypercatholic.

Every year in early autumn, like clockwork, the entire office would get stern lectures about the satanism of Halloween which was celebrated office-wide in decorations and post-Halloween candy bowls in the break room. Dressing up as “spooky things” in order to extort candy and trinkets from strangers. How can that not be devil worship?

I reminded her that Halloween is the shortened version of “All Hallows Eve” - the night before the All Saints Day feast honoring all the catholic saints. She replied: “Exactly! And it was taken over by pagan devil worshipers to worship satan!” ...which is pretty much exactly backwards when it isn't outright false.

The origins of Halloween go back to the druidic Celts of the British Isles. In early autumn, just before the snows started falling in Iron Age Britain, the Celts would celebrate the harvest, and honor their ancestors who taught them through the generations how to grow crops and care for the livestock that allowed them to survive. When the harvests were good, it was their ancestors' doing, keeping the evil goblin spirits away from their crops. When harvests were bad, it was the goblins' fault. In order to perpetuate the ritual, children would dress up as ghosts or goblins and elicit tokens from the old folks in the village to invest the kids in the notion that the good things in life are provided by, in this exercise, those who would be the honored dead of future harvest festivals.

Then the christians came to town. They hijacked the whole celebration and replaced it, lock, stock and barrel, with a brand new, made-up-on-the-spot catholic tradition that replaced the Celts' dead relatives with the whole roster of catholic saints from whom all good things were now, suddenly, being provided. The whole trick or treating thing was never that critical to the druidic harvest festival in the first place, and it was mostly ignored by the church as a children's game.

Indeed, it is mostly ignored, today, by the world, even in western, English-descended cultures. It's only in the US of the past several decades where Halloween is more than just the last day of October. This is primarily as a means of celebrating US prosperity and profligacy. Why else have a pseudo-holiday devoted to – of all things – candy? Who does that? Diabetics, maybe.

But satanic, it ain't. Unless it is.

Halloween has become increasingly commandeered by politics, and a more satanic system cannot be found. Specifically, it has been kidnapped by the politics of the wokesters. It is no longer acceptable to be a mere ghost or goblin. That only means you aren't playing Halloween properly. You must be someone. And the someone you be usually has to be drawn from the current popular cultural fiction. Like Harry Potter, Mulan, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You cannot be a prince or a princess, like Charming or Cinderella, because that is objectifying. Pirates are forbidden: “rape culture”. Soldiers promote violence. Cops have their own special problems today. A child caught in the wrong community being a cop for Halloween might just be put on trail as an accessory in the death of George Floyd.

The biggest commandment about Modern American Halloweening is that you not be culturally appropriating while being. A white girl cannot be Pocahontas, for example, because Pocahontas was an Indian... Native Ameri... girl... woman... person of color.

As the wokesters continually harp: stay in your own lane. Don't you know how insulting it is to those whose cultures you are laying claim to? Colonialism is over and done. If you're white you can only be white and you are never permitted to pretend to be anything else.

And finally, there is something the “progressive”, “woke” imbeciles stand for that I can get behind, for two can play that infantile game.

If certain Halloween costumes are forbidden to some because of their cultural heritage, then Halloween, as a Celtic ritual, belongs to the Celts and those descended from them. Which is to say, the Scots, the Welsh, the Britons [but not the English, who were German invaders] and even the Irish. Everyone else, please stay in your own lane. It is my ethnic heritage and you are not permitted to abscond with it.