Meh

Although it is the home of spectacular autumn scenes and some other very neat things, October doesn't really rise to being among the top months for me. The main reason is its very last day, All Hallows Eve, contracted to Halloween. Nov. 1 was long called All Saints Day, and in many cases some four or five hundred years ago, "Saints" and "Hallows" were interchangeable words. All Saints Day was meant to provide a feast day for the remembrance of Christian saints who might have been lost to record over time. It became in many places a day for remembering those in a church or community who had passed during the year.

As any number of "ackshually" experts can tell you, other, somewhat darker or more mysterious holidays from pagan religions were also celebrated at around the same time the Christian community fixed for All Saints Day. The best-known was the Gaelic festival of Samhain. Originally connected to the autumn solstice and the end of the harvest season, Samhain (pronounced "saw-wain") marked the time of the year when the sun was actually up for less time of the day than it was down -- literally, a darker time of the year. Invested with mystical significance, many believed that the special day was a time when the barriers between the natural and supernatural worlds were thinner, and thus food offerings were left to appease roaming spirits who would then skip eating the livestock.

Beginning in the 9th century, Christian churches marked All Saints Day on Nov. 1 and All Souls Day on Nov. 2. Samhain customs merged with Christian customs to produce something like our modern Halloween. A lot of people will say thus that Samhain predates Christianity, and perhaps it does. But Model Ts predate my Toyota Tundra, too, and I know which one I'd prefer to drive on a regular basis. Sometimes older doesn't mean truer.

Now, I have nothing against trick-or-treaters or candy or costumes or anything like that. But still, the day helps produce some of my least favorite movies and programming from among that least creative genre, horror. Some of the supernatural trappings from the old Samhain days could be a little scary, and they have been helped to metastasize to the sewage explosion of the modern horror genre, most closely linked to the Halloween holiday.

My newsfeeds, streaming channels and what have you are filled with advertisements for simplistic bloody garbage dressed up to "mean something." And it reaches heights (depths) of stupidity like Halloween franchise heroine Jamie Lee Curtis claiming that the most recent entry is some kind of commentary on the January 6 Capitol riots. I welcome All Saints Day as a chance to reflect on the good people in the faith who have gone before, who may have labored in some far-off place where no one wrote down their words or actions, and they were known but to God and the beneficiaries of those actions. But I also welcome it as the end of putting up with horror crap overload for another 11 months.