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Review: Death Makes A Holiday, by David J. Skal
Another review! Well, the El gives me lots of reading time.
Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Hallowe'en, by David J. Skal
Death Makes A Holiday opens, eerily, with a chapter titled "The Candyman's Tale" and a description of a young man taking his children out on a rainy Hallowe'en night in 1974. It's odd that the tension should be so palpable right from the start, but I was pretty sure the story couldn't end well, and it doesn't. What it does is document the single case of poisoning-or-assault via Hallowe'en candy ever recorded by police. No razors in apples, no heroin in Mars bars. But Skal has an explanation for the urban legends, and an intriguing link to their past as Hallowe'en symbols.
Skal's goal in Death Makes A Holiday is to take us on an enthusiastic, fascinated tour of the cultural history of Hallowe'en, predominantly in America. He does touch on other cultures but it's a very passing thing, and mainly to do with how those cultures interact with the American tradition (for example, Mexican politicians attempting to quash Hallowe'en-oriented activities because it culturally infringes on a religious holiday, Dio de los Muertos). What he seems primarily interested in is the evolution of Hallowe'en within the past hundred years, and specifically the "sanitisation" within the past fifty. Skal straddles a fine line; he speaks wistfully of a less paranoid time, but also presents that time as a period when Hallowe'en was mainly an excuse for hooliganism, riots, arson, and vandalism.
Skal sees the holiday as a class struggle, which is very right and proper in my opinion. Inversion festivals always have been, traditionally, going back through Carnivale to ancient Rome (though he doesn't trace Hallowe'en to Rome, and that is proper too; it's a similar form, but not the same festival at all). He has used some very imaginative research techniques: he looked not only at newspaper articles and other written accounts in the early part of the century, but also picture-postcards and costume catalogues. I'm not quite certain I buy a whole lot of the deductions he makes from a survey of postcards, but I respect his ingenuity in using them.
Skal spends very little time on the ancient roots of Hallowe'en, though he does dispel a few myths about its British origins and discusses 17th and 18th century traditions in Scotland and Ireland. He picks up Hallowe'en at the time of the Irish potato famine, positing that the Irish brought the holiday with them when they came across to America. If the holiday is indeed a class struggle, then this was a natural thing for them to do; most Irish landing on America's shores lived in utter, wretched poverty. The night gave the angry-poor leave to maraude through the neighbourhood and take out their fury on their wealthier neighbours.
There is also some time devoted to the Salem witch trials, which wouldn't seem to tie into the Hallowe'en spirit except for what Salem itself has become. Each year for the month of October Salem, Massacusetts, draws hundreds of thousands to its tiny bricklaid streets to shop, visit several witch museums in the area, attend the memorial to the Salem Witches, and buy lots and lots of merchandise. In this situation, the struggle is between religious fundamentalists, who denounce the holiday and all profit associated with it, and the Pagan/Wiccan/New Age set, for whom Hallowe'en is a sacred day.
Skal follows the evolution of Hallowe'en through the twenties, when trick-or-treating began to catch on as a method of protecting one's home against vandalism. The Great Depression sees a rise again in vandalism and assault, but the post-WWII-era, with its economic boom, seems to tame down Hallowe'en once and for all.
In the final chapters, Skal takes us up to the present time with a cultural study of three specific things: amateur and professional haunted houses, which began to take off in the 1960s; the gay rights movement and its association with Hallowe'en in San Francisco from the fifties onward; and how Hallowe'en and its themes have been treated in the cinema since its inception. The chapter on haunted houses was really interesting, and made me want to try designing one of my own. (Footnote: even with my tiny flat, I have an excellent setup for a haunted house, since I have both a front and back door to channel people through. So there!) "Halloween On Screen" was well-done too, though I'm only moderately interested in cinema and it's near the end of the book so I have to admit I skimmed a little. But what I thought was really interesting was the chapter about Hallowe'en and San Francisco.
Skal sees Hallowe'en as as sort of pre-Stonewall, almost a testing-the-waters for the Gay Rights Movement. Hallowe'en was the one night a year that Skal says the cops "gave" to the gay men and women of San Francisco, who were normally tightly strictured under San Francisco's surprisingly conservative closet laws. But the Hallowe'en parties and parades got bigger and bigger and as gay civil rights began to become a matter of necessary debate, the anti-homosexual violence escalated until the police had no choice but to partner with the traditional volunteers from the gay community in protecting the celebrants from assault. Even aside from being a fairly brilliant analysis of that holiday in that city, it is a compelling history of gay rights in San Francisco, including some information I hadn't previously heard anywhere (which is down in the quotes section).
Skal wrote the book presumably in 2001, and it was published in 2002, so he includes an Afterword entitled "September 11 and October 31". I didn't think much about it at the time, possibly because by Hallowe'en I was in final rehearsal of a vehemently anti-war play I had written in 2001, and was nervous about the reaction I would get. But Hallowe'en was the first holiday after 9/11, and it is a celebration of death and a katharsis even in these sterilised times. Skal talks about prop severed-limbs being removed from stores, haunted houses removing references to bioterrorism and one, in DC, shutting down completely due to its centrepiece image, the destruction of the Pentagon and White House. Another haunted house revised its design to include Osama Bin-Laden being executed in the electric chair. Parents kept their kids indoors for fear anthrax would be put in their candy. In some cities, Hallowe'en was cancelled. New York's Village Halloween Parade considered a cancellation before deciding on a new theme: the phoenix, symbolised by a giant puppet with a twenty-foot wingspan that curled through the streets of the city.
In the end, Skal says, Hallowe'en is a vital force in our culture, no matter how we "Martha Stewartize" it. It's always lurking beneath the surface, waiting for us to reconnect with our sense of -- fear of -- death and devastation. It is the second most-popular holiday after Christmas, if we measure by sheer dollars-expended, and as necessary now as the Roman inversion festivals were twenty-five hundred years ago.
Final Verdict: I found the book to be really engaging and interesting. Skal has some awesome subject matter and he treats it well. At times he gets a little bit tedious, but you can tell he loves the subject (he's written several other books on macabre themes) and he wants you to love it, too. It does make you want to get up and put on a Hallowe'en costume and go join a parade or build a haunted house or something. It's not the sort of book you would necessarily want to read twice, but I'd buy a copy if I found it second-hand, so that I could take it out every Hallowe'en and brush up. :D
And, quotes:
Always, the goal is the same: to tame the holiday, to somehow make it "nice." And nobody makes it nicer than Martha Stewart, America's formidable and self-created doyenne of the domestic arts. As authorized by Stewart in her recent book Halloween: Delicious Tricks and WIcked Treats for Your Scariest Halloween Ever, the behavior modification of the holiday is complete. For Stewart, everything about Halloween is Perfectly Under Control. It is a celebration oddly devoid of celebrants, especially children, who appear only sporadically throughout the book like well-behaved centerpieces, or, in one photo, completely hidden from view as a designer-sheet spook. Some of the decorations are decidedly child unfriendly [...] but it's not the kids' fun or safety that's important. [...] Perhaps the ultimate toast to boomerish narcissism is Martha's monogrammed pumpkin, a pure embodiment of self-celebration with no connection whatsoever to any known form of communal holiday observance. It is time, perhaps, to establish a new one: the consumerist harvest of the ego itself. -- p. 29
Among other traditional fortune-telling foods wsas colcannon, a dish made of mashed potatoes, parsnips, and onions, in which various charms were buried. Whoever found a ring was promised marriage within the year. A thimble augured the fate of a spinster or bachelor, a key signified a trip, a coin meant wealth, and so on. -- Scottish Hallowe'en divination rituals, p. 29
Halloween has now become its own economic paradigm, the largest holiday behind Christmas, and still growing. Precise figures are difficult to determine, but the annual economic impact of Halloween is now somewhere between four billion and six billion dollars, depending on the number and kinds of industries one includes in the calculations. According to the National Confectioners Association, candy alone accounted for two billion dollars in the year 2000. --p. 57
The august Peabody Essex Museum, repository of the original Salem witch trial documents, sponsors a lucrative series of "Eerie Events" featuring ghost stories told in "old, candlelit houses...prepare to shiver!" These readings, involving, as they do, direct human communication unmediated by overt commercialism, are a welcome respite from aggressively frenetic attractions that tend to dominate "Haunted Happenings" [in Salem]. -- p. 60
...these homegrown Halloween productions allow a spontaneous ritual skewering of suburban values. Odd psychodramas unfold as parents and children enact roles of victims and victimizers. Jamie vividly describes one house he visited, in which a mad-scientist mother performed crude "plastic surgery" on her teenage son, all the while cackling "Now you'll be exactly what I've always wanted!" Family members are replaced by effigies of witches and aliens in their favorite TV chairs, while crummy monster movies unreel monotonously on the VCR. Ovens, appliances, even toilets are reconfigured as devouring maws. Undercurrents of domestic violence and family dysfunction bubble up everywhere as the American dream is transmogrified into a hellish trap. -- p. 99
Gay men and women had gravitated to the city in different waves, and for different reasons. The sexual segregation of military life during the war had led untold numbers of enlisted people to discover, or at least come to terms with, their sexual orientation, and San Francisco was the frequent point of reentry to the civilian world for those who had served in the Pacific theatre. -- I had no idea this was the case, and I was educated in the San Francisco schools system. p. 124
In the years before the defiant Stonewall riots of 1969, in which Greenwich Village drag queens violently refused to acquiesce to police harrassment, the closet was brutally enforced. Fortunately, the closet had plenty of costumes. -- p. 125
A young woman writhes on a hospital gurney yelling "where is my baby?" An attending physician hands her what appears to be a small, blood-covered object - presumably an aborted fetus - and says , "Here, you knew what you were doing when you had the abortion." Then a teen-age girl steps forward and says, "I would have been that child." -- What religious fundamentalists put in their Haunted Houses, for reals. p. 136
Few holidays have a cinematic potential that equals Halloween's. Visually, the subject is unparalleled, if only considered in terms of costume design and art direction. Dramatically, Halloween's ancient roots evoke dark and melodramatic themes, ripe for transformation into film's language of shadow and light. Cinema itself had roots in magic-lantern presentations of the nineteenth century, which frequently evoked the possibility of contact with the spirit world. -- p. 155
Leading the parade from a site just a few blocks north of the police barricades which still cordoned off lower Manhattan, the phoenix led the parade north, accompanied by a phalanx of police and a marching band playing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." In previous years, any view of the approaching parade on lower Sixth Avenue would have had the World Trade Center towers as the dominant background element. Now, before an empty hole in the sky, there was only the Phoenix, its undulating form and twenty-foot wingspan animated by a half-dozen bamboo rods manipulated by puppeteers. "Despite the buzz that costume shops were selling a lot of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani masks and firefighter suits, there were few parade goers dressed as the mayor or firemen," reported National Public Radio correspondent John Kalish. -- p. 191
Another review! Well, the El gives me lots of reading time.
Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Hallowe'en, by David J. Skal
Death Makes A Holiday opens, eerily, with a chapter titled "The Candyman's Tale" and a description of a young man taking his children out on a rainy Hallowe'en night in 1974. It's odd that the tension should be so palpable right from the start, but I was pretty sure the story couldn't end well, and it doesn't. What it does is document the single case of poisoning-or-assault via Hallowe'en candy ever recorded by police. No razors in apples, no heroin in Mars bars. But Skal has an explanation for the urban legends, and an intriguing link to their past as Hallowe'en symbols.
Skal's goal in Death Makes A Holiday is to take us on an enthusiastic, fascinated tour of the cultural history of Hallowe'en, predominantly in America. He does touch on other cultures but it's a very passing thing, and mainly to do with how those cultures interact with the American tradition (for example, Mexican politicians attempting to quash Hallowe'en-oriented activities because it culturally infringes on a religious holiday, Dio de los Muertos). What he seems primarily interested in is the evolution of Hallowe'en within the past hundred years, and specifically the "sanitisation" within the past fifty. Skal straddles a fine line; he speaks wistfully of a less paranoid time, but also presents that time as a period when Hallowe'en was mainly an excuse for hooliganism, riots, arson, and vandalism.
Skal sees the holiday as a class struggle, which is very right and proper in my opinion. Inversion festivals always have been, traditionally, going back through Carnivale to ancient Rome (though he doesn't trace Hallowe'en to Rome, and that is proper too; it's a similar form, but not the same festival at all). He has used some very imaginative research techniques: he looked not only at newspaper articles and other written accounts in the early part of the century, but also picture-postcards and costume catalogues. I'm not quite certain I buy a whole lot of the deductions he makes from a survey of postcards, but I respect his ingenuity in using them.
Skal spends very little time on the ancient roots of Hallowe'en, though he does dispel a few myths about its British origins and discusses 17th and 18th century traditions in Scotland and Ireland. He picks up Hallowe'en at the time of the Irish potato famine, positing that the Irish brought the holiday with them when they came across to America. If the holiday is indeed a class struggle, then this was a natural thing for them to do; most Irish landing on America's shores lived in utter, wretched poverty. The night gave the angry-poor leave to maraude through the neighbourhood and take out their fury on their wealthier neighbours.
There is also some time devoted to the Salem witch trials, which wouldn't seem to tie into the Hallowe'en spirit except for what Salem itself has become. Each year for the month of October Salem, Massacusetts, draws hundreds of thousands to its tiny bricklaid streets to shop, visit several witch museums in the area, attend the memorial to the Salem Witches, and buy lots and lots of merchandise. In this situation, the struggle is between religious fundamentalists, who denounce the holiday and all profit associated with it, and the Pagan/Wiccan/New Age set, for whom Hallowe'en is a sacred day.
Skal follows the evolution of Hallowe'en through the twenties, when trick-or-treating began to catch on as a method of protecting one's home against vandalism. The Great Depression sees a rise again in vandalism and assault, but the post-WWII-era, with its economic boom, seems to tame down Hallowe'en once and for all.
In the final chapters, Skal takes us up to the present time with a cultural study of three specific things: amateur and professional haunted houses, which began to take off in the 1960s; the gay rights movement and its association with Hallowe'en in San Francisco from the fifties onward; and how Hallowe'en and its themes have been treated in the cinema since its inception. The chapter on haunted houses was really interesting, and made me want to try designing one of my own. (Footnote: even with my tiny flat, I have an excellent setup for a haunted house, since I have both a front and back door to channel people through. So there!) "Halloween On Screen" was well-done too, though I'm only moderately interested in cinema and it's near the end of the book so I have to admit I skimmed a little. But what I thought was really interesting was the chapter about Hallowe'en and San Francisco.
Skal sees Hallowe'en as as sort of pre-Stonewall, almost a testing-the-waters for the Gay Rights Movement. Hallowe'en was the one night a year that Skal says the cops "gave" to the gay men and women of San Francisco, who were normally tightly strictured under San Francisco's surprisingly conservative closet laws. But the Hallowe'en parties and parades got bigger and bigger and as gay civil rights began to become a matter of necessary debate, the anti-homosexual violence escalated until the police had no choice but to partner with the traditional volunteers from the gay community in protecting the celebrants from assault. Even aside from being a fairly brilliant analysis of that holiday in that city, it is a compelling history of gay rights in San Francisco, including some information I hadn't previously heard anywhere (which is down in the quotes section).
Skal wrote the book presumably in 2001, and it was published in 2002, so he includes an Afterword entitled "September 11 and October 31". I didn't think much about it at the time, possibly because by Hallowe'en I was in final rehearsal of a vehemently anti-war play I had written in 2001, and was nervous about the reaction I would get. But Hallowe'en was the first holiday after 9/11, and it is a celebration of death and a katharsis even in these sterilised times. Skal talks about prop severed-limbs being removed from stores, haunted houses removing references to bioterrorism and one, in DC, shutting down completely due to its centrepiece image, the destruction of the Pentagon and White House. Another haunted house revised its design to include Osama Bin-Laden being executed in the electric chair. Parents kept their kids indoors for fear anthrax would be put in their candy. In some cities, Hallowe'en was cancelled. New York's Village Halloween Parade considered a cancellation before deciding on a new theme: the phoenix, symbolised by a giant puppet with a twenty-foot wingspan that curled through the streets of the city.
In the end, Skal says, Hallowe'en is a vital force in our culture, no matter how we "Martha Stewartize" it. It's always lurking beneath the surface, waiting for us to reconnect with our sense of -- fear of -- death and devastation. It is the second most-popular holiday after Christmas, if we measure by sheer dollars-expended, and as necessary now as the Roman inversion festivals were twenty-five hundred years ago.
Final Verdict: I found the book to be really engaging and interesting. Skal has some awesome subject matter and he treats it well. At times he gets a little bit tedious, but you can tell he loves the subject (he's written several other books on macabre themes) and he wants you to love it, too. It does make you want to get up and put on a Hallowe'en costume and go join a parade or build a haunted house or something. It's not the sort of book you would necessarily want to read twice, but I'd buy a copy if I found it second-hand, so that I could take it out every Hallowe'en and brush up. :D
And, quotes:
Always, the goal is the same: to tame the holiday, to somehow make it "nice." And nobody makes it nicer than Martha Stewart, America's formidable and self-created doyenne of the domestic arts. As authorized by Stewart in her recent book Halloween: Delicious Tricks and WIcked Treats for Your Scariest Halloween Ever, the behavior modification of the holiday is complete. For Stewart, everything about Halloween is Perfectly Under Control. It is a celebration oddly devoid of celebrants, especially children, who appear only sporadically throughout the book like well-behaved centerpieces, or, in one photo, completely hidden from view as a designer-sheet spook. Some of the decorations are decidedly child unfriendly [...] but it's not the kids' fun or safety that's important. [...] Perhaps the ultimate toast to boomerish narcissism is Martha's monogrammed pumpkin, a pure embodiment of self-celebration with no connection whatsoever to any known form of communal holiday observance. It is time, perhaps, to establish a new one: the consumerist harvest of the ego itself. -- p. 29
Among other traditional fortune-telling foods wsas colcannon, a dish made of mashed potatoes, parsnips, and onions, in which various charms were buried. Whoever found a ring was promised marriage within the year. A thimble augured the fate of a spinster or bachelor, a key signified a trip, a coin meant wealth, and so on. -- Scottish Hallowe'en divination rituals, p. 29
Halloween has now become its own economic paradigm, the largest holiday behind Christmas, and still growing. Precise figures are difficult to determine, but the annual economic impact of Halloween is now somewhere between four billion and six billion dollars, depending on the number and kinds of industries one includes in the calculations. According to the National Confectioners Association, candy alone accounted for two billion dollars in the year 2000. --p. 57
The august Peabody Essex Museum, repository of the original Salem witch trial documents, sponsors a lucrative series of "Eerie Events" featuring ghost stories told in "old, candlelit houses...prepare to shiver!" These readings, involving, as they do, direct human communication unmediated by overt commercialism, are a welcome respite from aggressively frenetic attractions that tend to dominate "Haunted Happenings" [in Salem]. -- p. 60
...these homegrown Halloween productions allow a spontaneous ritual skewering of suburban values. Odd psychodramas unfold as parents and children enact roles of victims and victimizers. Jamie vividly describes one house he visited, in which a mad-scientist mother performed crude "plastic surgery" on her teenage son, all the while cackling "Now you'll be exactly what I've always wanted!" Family members are replaced by effigies of witches and aliens in their favorite TV chairs, while crummy monster movies unreel monotonously on the VCR. Ovens, appliances, even toilets are reconfigured as devouring maws. Undercurrents of domestic violence and family dysfunction bubble up everywhere as the American dream is transmogrified into a hellish trap. -- p. 99
Gay men and women had gravitated to the city in different waves, and for different reasons. The sexual segregation of military life during the war had led untold numbers of enlisted people to discover, or at least come to terms with, their sexual orientation, and San Francisco was the frequent point of reentry to the civilian world for those who had served in the Pacific theatre. -- I had no idea this was the case, and I was educated in the San Francisco schools system. p. 124
In the years before the defiant Stonewall riots of 1969, in which Greenwich Village drag queens violently refused to acquiesce to police harrassment, the closet was brutally enforced. Fortunately, the closet had plenty of costumes. -- p. 125
A young woman writhes on a hospital gurney yelling "where is my baby?" An attending physician hands her what appears to be a small, blood-covered object - presumably an aborted fetus - and says , "Here, you knew what you were doing when you had the abortion." Then a teen-age girl steps forward and says, "I would have been that child." -- What religious fundamentalists put in their Haunted Houses, for reals. p. 136
Few holidays have a cinematic potential that equals Halloween's. Visually, the subject is unparalleled, if only considered in terms of costume design and art direction. Dramatically, Halloween's ancient roots evoke dark and melodramatic themes, ripe for transformation into film's language of shadow and light. Cinema itself had roots in magic-lantern presentations of the nineteenth century, which frequently evoked the possibility of contact with the spirit world. -- p. 155
Leading the parade from a site just a few blocks north of the police barricades which still cordoned off lower Manhattan, the phoenix led the parade north, accompanied by a phalanx of police and a marching band playing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." In previous years, any view of the approaching parade on lower Sixth Avenue would have had the World Trade Center towers as the dominant background element. Now, before an empty hole in the sky, there was only the Phoenix, its undulating form and twenty-foot wingspan animated by a half-dozen bamboo rods manipulated by puppeteers. "Despite the buzz that costume shops were selling a lot of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani masks and firefighter suits, there were few parade goers dressed as the mayor or firemen," reported National Public Radio correspondent John Kalish. -- p. 191
