Blood and circuses

Our balcony looks like it recently hosted a chain saw massacre. There is blood all over the place. Thankfully, it’s fake blood which was being applied last week to a small flock of ghosts and ghoulies about to step out for a sugar hit. At one point there were six or seven of them and a gaggle of mothers painting them with makeup. All the children were, of course, dressing up for Halloween, a festival which the Grumpy Grandma disprizes and mutters against each year.

Why do we celebrate Halloween? It’s an American festival based on the annual Christian commemoration of All Hallows Eve, the day before Allhallowtide (November 1), the time in the Western Christian liturgical year to remember the dead including the saints; apparently the saints, with which the Christian Church abounds, can also be called “hallows”. Halloween probably originated in Celtic harvest festivals but became Christianised and its customs brought to the USA by Irish and Scots immigrants during the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t the first pagan tradition which made its way to Christianity. Christmas Day itself, December 25, was the birthday of Sol Invictus or the Unconquered Sun and Easter was originally a festival celebrating the spring equinox. The early Christians were clever in blending ancient traditions with Christian teaching but sometimes it went the other way around. Valentine’s Day on February 14 is descended from a celebration of one of the St Valentines (apparently Christianity had more than one saint of that name or similar and they were all martyrs) but has evolved into a day to mark romance. Some scholars believe the day as it came to be was a Christian whitewash of the Roman Lupercalia on the Ides of February (February 15), a festival which celebrated sex with a lot of hanky panky. (Remember the Ides of March when Julius Caesar got his come-uppance in a rather permanent way.)

I think I recently broke my seven-year-old’s heart by telling him that there wasn’t actually a Santa Claus coming down the chimney with presents on Christmas eve. Santa was, as I’m sure you all know, a composite invention of various Americans vaguely based on the 3^rd Century CE St Nicholas, through the Dutch Sinter Klaas. He cheered up a bit when I reminded him that we celebrate Chanukah and he will get lots of chocolate money wrapped in gold paper.

Navigating through and around the various things children want to know is not easy. Pre-Covid and maybe sometime again in the next decade, I taught Jewish scripture to the handful of Jewish children at Mona Vale Public School. The material I use for teaching is prepared by the Board of Jewish Education and follows the basic Jewish traditions including, of course, the central tenet – teachings about God. The children would occasionally ask me if I believed in God. Happily, I remembered the way I taught my own children, using the handy phrase “most people think …”.

Mortality is another idea which worries the seven-year-old. Because I now have to wear a mask to sleep at night, I told the boys about my diagnosis of severe sleep apnoea and what it meant. Asher has taken to giving me cuddles at night-time and telling me not to go to sleep; he worries that I won’t wake up. I’ve promised him I’ll try to stick around till I’m really, really old (as opposed to just plain old, a stage I’ve already reached).

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Novelist L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”