This year, Americans will spend nearly $7.5bn on a dressing-up game played for one day a year. Halloween is an occasion to make an anthropologist salivate, and a humanist despair. There is an element of seasonal melancholy or nostalgia to this complaint: 1,700 years ago there were probably pagans to lament the way that shallow Britons, aping the fashions of their Roman colonial masters, had taken up ridiculous made-up Christian saints to replace the depth and richness of the old pagan rituals.
Yet there is something dispiriting in the shrunken imagination of commercial Halloween. Soon everyone will recognise that the true colours of autumn are black and orange plastic. This is an impoverishment of older and richer traditions but it can’t really be blamed on commercialism. The old traditions died because they no longer literally moved anyone. Commercial Halloween is popular because it is a game that anyone can play. Children and adults all find themselves doing things: walking around, talking to strangers, exploring and claiming their neighbourhoods. It’s true that Halloween reduces death and evil to a joke, where the solemnities of All Souls’ Day and traditions like picnicking in graveyards took death and loss and darkness much more seriously.
But humankind cannot bear very much reality. We need to deal with darkness by making it part of a game – and if religion no longer does that, then Halloween must do.
