All Hallow's E'en

Hallowe’en! Pish!

Maybe, hundreds of years ago, Allhallows tide was a decent festival.

Maybe.

Perhaps, during samhain, festivities were wrought for the celebration of harvest festival and the guarding against the ‘Dark Time’. Winter.

Perhaps.

Nobody cares now. Everybody cares about knocking on doors and saying ‘Trick or Treat', whatever that means.

Nobody cares about the coming of the ‘Dark Time’.

As long as we get our sweets—candies they call them now.

Carve out the pumpkin and make jokes of the light that comes out of the grinning, toothy face. Possibly there will be pumpkin pie made from the scooped out innards of the great fruit.

That sums it up. It’s a joke.

Children dressing up in ghoulish costumes and pretending to be a mini-Dracula or a tiny skeleton knocking on the doors of people who, really, just want to be left alone for a quiet night indoors.

We are compelled to buy small treats in huge quantities to cater for the voracious demands of a horde of small people accompanied by older children or parents.

Corporate insensitivity doesn’t care about the old folk or the disbelievers—the killjoys, as they are collectively known.

Let’s get money.

For costumes, for make-up, for sweets and any other merchandising we can fob off on the people who love to revel.

It’s a joke.

Do you remember when it wasn’t a joke?

Do you remember the old times? When we believed in things that go bump in the night?

Do you recall the fear of the ‘Dark Times’? How we used to huddle together for warmth and comfort? When we had the animals in with us in the crofts and cottages to add their warmth and comforting presence?

Is the memory of the birds roosting up in the thatch to share the warmth still with you?

Longer and longer the dark lasts until the winter solstice. Then we celebrate that the light is coming.

Do you remember our faces? How happy we were when we knew that the darkness was losing ground to the light? When we knew that it would be warm again soon?

The corporations perverted our winter solstice festival for their greed. They turned it into a time of guilt if you spent less than your income on giving. If you spent less than lavishly on the eating and drinking to excess; the need to send cards and greetings to people you barely knew and never liked.

The magic in the mistletoe is lost; the power of the evergreen is gone.

So it has become with All Hallows E’en. The tentacles of greed reach ever further into our pockets.

Do you remember the time before the corporations? When there was magic and fairies that would protect us from the goblins and mischievous sprites.

We had people who knew how to ward off the succubus and the incubus that came to us in the eve of the ‘Dark Times’. They had potions and spells that protected us.

Now we have sweets—treats, and costumes. Mummery for children.

The ghouls and hobgoblins are toys of the infants; they are the stuff of fiction writers and television series. The makers of cheap films to frighten the foolish and send them home, giggling, to their warm beds and safe homes in the suburbs.

Of course you do not remember. You are dead.

I killed you when you were yet young.

You were imbued with the vigour and the desire to kill the wraiths that coiled around us and our homes.

I tried to warn you but you would fain listen to me, your guardian.

Now I am unable to discern your knock from the infants’ that come to my door for their annual booty.

I have put a sign up for their safety that warns them to stay clear but to no avail such is their ardent desire for sweet prizes.

Why can you not warn them, keep them away.

Hallowe’en! Pish! You are too weak to aid them in their petty little lives.

Every year the police come and ask me if I have seen yet more missing children.

Every year I tell them that I have not. That I gave out the sweets and limped back to my fireside where the warmth quells the arthritis in my aging bones.

Every year I have to stir the remains in the grate to make sure that the children have all gone...