“A pity – I miss all the Vigils. Why on earth were they suddenly suppressed?” wrote Thomas Merton in his journal on December 7, 1959. One of Merton's lost vigils was today's Vigil of All Saints, one of the many casualties of the rigid, liturgical ideology that disparaged vigils and inspired much of the Catholic calendar reform of the mid-20th century.
In its secularized form, however, as Halloween, this vigil has not only survived. it has thrived! Halloween is now the second-largest commercial holiday in the U.S., second only to Christmas - thanks to increased consumer spending on costumes, candy, and decorations. (Americans spent over $11 billion on Halloween in 2024!)
When I was a young "trick-or-treater" back in the 1950s Bronx, Halloween was largely a children's holiday - a mildly transgressive opportunity for kids to dress in costume and extort candy and coins from their neighbors (and even from perfect strangers). Adults did have Halloween parties. Even my parents hosted one once. But "trick-or-treating" was for children. That some adults also now "trick or treat" seems to me to be bizarre, although in a society in which adults have now for decades imitated their kids in how they dress on a daily basis, perhaps it is not so bizarre that they should imitate kids in costume on Halloween as well!
Actually, what I think has happened is that our generation enjoyed Halloween so much as kids that many find it hard to give it up as adults. As such it is now a more extravagant and expensive version of the somewhat silly children's holiday we celebrated decades ago - all about festivity and fun, with only a residual recollection of traditionally transgressive behavior and the frightening imaginings it evoked. Halloween's haunting, frightening spirit has been safely tamed for this era of "safe spaces." (Compare the witches in today's Wicked with last century's Wizard of Oz.)
In the fairy tales with which we in my generation grew up, however, while the ending was usually a "happily-ever-after" one, the route to that happy ending was strewn with wicked witches and other formidably frightening forces. I remember as a child thinking how lucky I was to live in the present, rather than once-upon-a-time when all those wicked witches and dragons and monsters were a regular threat. Of course, as I eventually learned, the witches and monsters were not literally real. But what they represented, the real evils lurking in the world for so much of human history, tormenting human beings and frustrating human hopes, were very real indeed - and still are.
Christianity claimed to have overcome the demonic powers through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and so started the process of disenchanting our experience of nature, which we increasingly aspired to control and tame to meet our increasing needs. Paradoxically now, nature has been transformed by our efforts to tame it, into an even more threatening apocalyptic monster in the form of humanly caused climate change.
What we now call Halloween (a name which itself reflects its Christian character as the Vigil of All Saints) was originally an ancient pagan festival occurring at a major seasonal turning point in the year, the transition from summer to winter and from one year to the next. Originally a night of fear in the face of the forces of evil, it was incorporated into the Christian calendar late in the first millennium when All Saints Day was moved to November 1. In moving the feast of All Saints to November - from the original May 13 anniversary of the 609 Dedication of the Roman Pantheon as a Christian Church Sancta Maria ad Martyres - the medieval Church was symbolically celebrating Christ's triumph over the demonic elements traditionally associated with the pagan festival we now call Halloween. In effect, this ritualized the triumph of Christianity over older pre-Christian European paganism by celebrating the triumph of God's grace (exemplified in the experience of the saints) over sin and Satan. If Halloween is now an $11 billion-plus extravaganza that now largely overshadows All Saints, perhaps that sadly symbolizes the cultural resurgence of a new post-Christian paganism over a Christian faith increasingly being consigned to society's margins. Dangerously, the Christian concept of Halloween as the celebration of God's triumph over evil has been increasingly replaced by a resurgent paganism, in which the demonic is celebrated as benevolent and even fun!
Fun it most certainly is not, as the consequences of our secularizing disenchantment increasingly extort their toll upon our world and on our relationships with one another and with that world. Most of us no longer fear literal ghosts. Yet everywhere we are haunted by evil spirits of our own creation, traditional human calamities like war and inequality and novel contemporary ones like social media and climate change, which are all coming back to haunt us.
We are haunted by demagogues and zombie ideologies that block us from understanding (let alone responding to) contemporary challenges. Way worse, however, we are haunted by our mutual hatreds and a kind of cultural civil war, which the worst among us have for decades now been encouraging us to fight. We are haunted by our divisions, which have weakened us, have separated us from one another, and have paralyzed the collective action called for if we are to face the witches and monsters of our day.
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