SAMAS said:
Therumancer said:
Firefilm said:
What's Ruining Halloween?
Hope you're enjoying Smocktober! This week we get just a little more raunchy than normal talking about what costumes are ruining Halloween.
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Crazy Zaul said:
America does Halloween costumes completely wrong anyway. Halloween is about skeletons, witches, ghosts and shit. Not Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, Captain America or whatever random cosplay you feel like.
Well, to an extent you can blame decades of SJWs long before that was even considered as a term. Basically it comes down to massive pressures leveled against those who wear costumes that might offend someone, leading to costumes needing to invariably be cheesy, as in obviously costumes, and as sanitized as possible. If your costume is too gross or actually unsettling then by definition your wrong and standards are that people have the right to run you off for it. Likewise dressing up as a ghost, witch, etc... can be seen as being offensive to those who really believe in such things. For example there have been concerted efforts by new agers, backed by SJWs, to both try and change Halloween, and also to pressure people not to dress like the traditional "scary" witch or various "monsters" which were by their standards stolen and changed by Christians into something else entirely. Over the last few years we've had liberals pushing the whole "It's a culture, not a costume" thing, going after white guys dressing up as arab terrorists, or women wearing Geisha costumes (since there are real ones), or people dressing as Samurai and Ninjas since they can be seen as mockeries of the real thing, or a lot of other things. Dressing up in something, silly, sexy, and/or recognizably being a popular current IP represents a rather safe thing to do, your less likely to be accosted by SJWs, or turned away from parties and such because the hosts are afraid of being accosted by SJWs. Apparently a lot of schools, colleges, and civic gathering places (beaches, etc...) with "open door" access to their parties have been putting out rather extensive lists of what you can or cannot wear without being ejected.
In the immortal words of Wikipedia: "[citation needed]"
On the flip side of things you also have the reactionary Christians, who have always had an issue with Halloween and people donning the guise of evil. Most Christians don't care of course, but you get plenty that refuse to participate, and others who feel it's their duty to try and politically and socially pressure everyone else to save them, and since this is allowed, in a lot of areas it greatly ruins people's fun, and/or exerts influence. Basically most Christians of the sort who have an issue an are active care less if your dressed like say "Captain America" but they DO care if your say dressed as a demon, witch, or walking corpse.
Which is sad, because it was Christians (albeit superstitious ones) who came up with that in the first place: Disguise yourselves as ghosts, witches and spirits so the real ones won't know who to go after.
For the record this is why I tell people to do their own research since this falls under "common knowledge". However I'm in a magnanimous mood right now so: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/were-a-culture-not-a-costume
See, when it comes to this kind of thing which most people should be aware of (or are, but tend not to put the pieces together or forget when it doesn't fit the point they want to make) I tend not to want to do people's homework for them. Simply put just type in "it's a culture not a costume". This all started back around 2011 and has recurred since then, and became so well know as that link points out Something Awful even started making fun of it. That said, since they are putting up all the signs again this month (or at least around where I've been) this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. Some stores like "Spirit Of Halloween" have even gone so far (at least in parts of SE Connecticut) as to not carry specific "ethnic costumes" due to liberal pressure. I won't say you can't find one, but at the same time I've also noticed a lot less geisha costumes, turbans, and other things just browsing retail when these kinds of things were fairly stock items.
As far as Halloween itself goes, it's mixed. Here I sort of would give you a citation but the knowledge I have comes from mixed sources gained over years (without really looking) but it's quite doable if your interested. The bottom line is that "Halloween" as we celebrate it now comes from the basic idea of an autumn festival heralding the upcoming winter. For whatever reason a lot of different cultures and regions all wound up having festivals around this time, probably because of fear over the winter and wanting to have one last good time. It's also when a lot of primitive peoples did their sacrifices both to protect the bounty they had gathered, ensure a bounty next year, and of course for a mild winter. This is when a lot of cultists and such would perform their sacrifices, including human ones, and/or perform raids to sacrifice people from other communities. When you talk to people about the truth of Halloween you'll get a lot of stuff about All Hallows Eve, Lammas Night, Wulpurgis, and of course Samhain all crushed together even if some of it has little to do with the source. One interesting "fact" about occult philosophies is that a lot of them point to a rising tide of energy on, or around, the time of Halloween, ley lines (Dragon Lines to the Chinese), and all of these things are supposed to become more powerful, making it an ideal time for rituals, and of course some religions also point towards this being a time when the fabric between the worlds of the living and dead are a lot more fragile, I believe Mexican/South American religions and some forms of Voodoo hold to this in particular.
At any rate, one theory I've heard about the costumes isn't just that since this is the night when all the supernatural things can walk the earth you can disguise yourself. One theory I've run into is that back in the bad old days in Europe before the Christians had fully eliminated the pagans, there were wide rashes of various tribes donning their ritual garb including masks and such and raiding towns to drag away people, especially kids, to sacrifice. If you look at some movies going for a scary-neo-pagan thing like say the horrendous "Wicker Man" movie with Nicolas Cage and how the people dressed, or in a non-lethal capacity the pagan rites featured in "Eyes Wide Shut" you get the idea. The basic idea was allegedly that some of the smaller communities would disguise themselves by wearing costumes so the Pagans wouldn't recognize them, especially in the dark. Basically, wear a mask, keep quiet, go out and pretend your doing the same thing, and your relatively safe as the pagans wouldn't attack their own, especially seeing as there was no way for them to tell who was hiding their religion in some of these towns (allegedly). Probably mostly bunk, but it's one of the theories and makes as much sense as anything. While I wouldn't doubt something like that might have happened at some point, I can't see it working year after year.
At any rate, walk around New England sometime and you'll run into a lot of places that will be glad to tell you the "Truth" about Halloween, oftentimes quite contradictory. Salem Mass. in particular does a pretty brusque tourist trade this time of year it seems, and despite the likely truth of the witch hunts the reputation has made it something of a mecca for the weird. The long and the short of it, is that Halloween as it exists now has no real historical analogy, being pretty much it's own thing, that said at the same time pretty much every historical truth people try and smush into it is probably also true to some extent, but of course very few people really pay attention or care, and a lot of it seems to be contradictory.
As far as Halloween being a Christian holiday, I suppose it's Christian as much as anyone else's at this point. That said it seems a lot of the most enthusiastic Christians tend to be very anti-Halloween because pretty much everything it involves came from other religions, cults, and belief structures. I'm sure there are some little touches and such here that came from Christianity over the years in terms of how some people celebrate it. That said, it's not a holiday God, Jesus, or any Saint or Pope I'm aware of declared.
At the end of the day though I think Halloween exists mostly as a "for fun" holiday, because as I said, a lot of it seems to mostly be in preparation for the upcoming winter and the harvest that presumably just finished. In modern society we're pretty well protected from the environment (at least in the first world) and we've developed production/storage techniques and trade that allows food to be available all year 'round. We also understand a lot more about illness, the weather, and similar things and vaccinate our population heavily against things like The Flu. Basically a lack of food would be a big deal since we're used to having plenty, such concerns are not a matter of routine for most folks. At any rate, back in the day it's easy to see how people might have thought they needed to appease or hide from the spirits that were going to bring illness, or cause stored food to spoil. When say every family has to worry about losing someone (or everyone) to the flu each year as a very real possibility, the idea of a community say killing one of their own to prevent it, or killing other people the community doesn't like, doesn't seem as outlandish. When your using a supernatural explanation, it can be seen as a matter of killing a few people now to save more people later, and/or very much an us or them point of view. However even without all of those dangers, the bottom line is most of us don't really grow food, harvest, or work for our substinence, and thus major changes in the weather tend to mostly influence what we wear and if we run the heater or AC.
Such are my thoughts.
