Pumpkin Blues

I have been a pumpkin-carver wanna-be for a while. I have always envied those people who could carve intricate designs in a pumpkin, with curves and curlicues and shapes that seemed to defy the reality of a paring knife. My pumpkins were usually limitted to three triangles (two eyes and a nose) with a gaping toothless smile. That was pretty much all I could manage with paring knives. More often than not, I would cut the teeth off my pumpkin face as the paring knife would slip just as I got close! If I was lucky, my pumpkin would have one tooth! This year, I was introduced to a higher level of pumpkin carving via the oh-so-cheap "pumpkin carving kit"... complete with two small saw like instruments, pumpkin guts scooper, felt pen and tracing templates. Amazing!!! That is all I can say!! I have spent the last 44 years of my life using crude and clutzy instruments to carve pumpkins... massacre pumpkins is more like it. And now... the fine intricacies of pumpkin carving have openned up to me. Which only goes to show... sometimes it isn't the skill that makes a difference, sometimes you do need the right tools for the job. Yet, all this pumpkin carving is for naught apparently. It is past 7:30 pm and although we have Halloween decals on the windows, Halloween wind streamers and pumpkins... we have no trick-or-treaters! Quite a disappointment... but perhaps Hallloween is evolving...

Originally the pagan festival of Samhain, this date and feast was usurped by the Church as All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints day. Recently, the Church has lamented on the fact that this orignally Christian feast has become a secular event. Now, it seems to becoming solely a marketing event. Lots of decorations out there, pumpkins sold out at Superstore, some people dressed up, but really, no heart to it anymore. Fears of H1N1, fears of sexual predators, fears of razors in candy all suffice to keep people close to home this year. Has Halloween found its demise?? Is it a non-event... something whose time has come and gone...

Perhaps we have lost touch with the deeper routes of the feast... standing in the face of the fear of death and mocking it, making fun of it, laughing at it... and moving on with our lives. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead, celebrated on Nov 1, is still a major holiday festival with parades and decorations galore. The heart of the holiday is to remember those who have died. Perhaps we have lost that heart in our Halloween. It has become something else, something shallow that means nothing. Humans like rituals, we connect with the deeper meaning of things. If Halloween has lost its deeper meaning, it is to be expected that it will become a shallow husk, a hollow of its former glory. Perhaps the Mexicans have it right... celebrate the heart of it... laughing at the seeming triumph of death, but always knowing, believing that there is something more...

The pagans of former centuries believed that on the festival of Samhain, the boundary between this world and the underworld became thin. They believed in the afterlife, believed in something beyond this life. Perhaps, we do well to recognize the power of that boundary, the boundary between life and death... or between life and new-life...