Halloween: A Day For Shadows

When I was in elementary school, my favorite holiday was Halloween. Every year, my mom would help me throw an awesome Halloween party at the house for all the guys in my class.  Those parties are some of the best memories I have. We would play with silly string, smash a piñata, bob for apples, pin the fangs on the vampire, and more. At the end of the party, my mom would always give out these little gift bags and for the next whole week everyone would be talking about the party at school.  It was glorious. But that wasn’t even my favorite part of Halloween. And no, it wasn’t the candy either; it was dressing up in costumes. As far as I can remember, I’ve always loved to wear costumes.  When I was around four years old, my mom would let me wear my Spider-Man costume to the supermarket at random times of the year. When I entered school, I would pick a random day to bust out a costume every once in a while. Wearing costumes at inappropriate times led to some strange looks and mean comments, but for the most part I didn’t care. I just loved dressing up. And I loved that once a year, the other kids would dress up with me.

As I got older, my perception of Halloween began to change. As I transitioned through my middle school and high school years, Halloween became significantly more mischievous. At first, in middle school, my friends started to get involved with throwing rotten eggs and spraying shaving cream. Sometimes at each other. Sometimes at houses that didn’t give out any candy. I was never into it. Breaking the rules made me nervous. I just wanted to wear my costume and trick-or-treat. It hurt my heart to know that as I was getting older, trick-or-treating was becoming less and less acceptable. By time I reached high school, trick-or-treating had been all but banned from my experience of life. Somehow (in the eyes of my friends) it was more okay to throw eggs and spray houses with shaving cream than it was to politely ask them for candy. We had become too old for that. Instead, we were pursuing alcohol, house parties, and hook ups. I can’t say that none of it was fun, but it was certainly a different type of fun.

In college, my perception of Halloween changed again. This time, we kept the alcohol, costumes and house parties, added bars and the fear of getting shot or mugged in some gang initiation ritual, and finally subtracted the rotten egg and shaving cream mischief. Around this time, I started to lose some enthusiasm for Halloween. For the first few years of college, I was still really excited about the costumes. But by my senior year, Halloween had become no more to me than a night at the bar when all the girls were going to be wearing less clothing and trying harder to be sexy. I’m not saying I have a problem with that, but it just doesn’t have me as excited as I used to be when I was dressing up as a kid.

This year, I took some time to reflect upon Halloween. Until this year, I hadn’t taken the time to notice how drastically my perspective on the holiday has shifted since I was a little kid. But as I question what this holiday is supposed to be all about, I wonder if there is a much deeper meaning and purpose for Halloween than the miniature spectrum of my own experiences over the past ten years or so. Halloween is unique. While most holidays celebrate some form of light, beauty, and life, on Halloween, we celebrate darkness, gore, and death. I wonder how over the years, we haven’t decided to phase out a holiday with such gruesome undertones.

Then I considered, maybe it’s because we need a day to let it all out. We need a day for darkness. A day for shadows. The way I understand it, a psychological shadow is a term to describe a bundle of information that we refuse to allow ourselves to accept. For example, imagine a person who is constantly talking about how handsome he is and how ugly everyone else is. When we apply the perspective of shadow, we can see this person as someone who is insecure about his own looks, but refuses to accept it. Instead, he attempts to suppress those feelings, but ends up projecting them on to other people. That’s how the shadow works. Although we attempt to block information from our consciousness, we can only do so temporarily, as it will always seek to find its way back into our minds – most frequently through projection.

In this perspective, Halloween is a shadow holiday. It’s the day that we allow all the scary thoughts we suppress year round to express themselves. It’s to prevent them from all building up. Once a year, we get together, and we let our consciousness take a back seat to the expression of our shadows. In recent years, I have heard a tremendous amount of criticism about the way female costume are now more of lingerie than they are costumes. This is the shadow desire to show off the body and engage in promiscuity.  Normally, women are criticized for being “slutty” if they take anywhere near as liberal of an attitude toward sex as men. On average, this results in women suppressing more of their sexual feelings than men do because there are more negative consequences reflected when they express those feelings. So on this night, while of course there will still be criticism, it is more acceptable for the promiscuous, adventurous, untamed, female shadow to emerge.

But it’s not just women who are releasing suppressed shadows on Halloween, I’d say it’s almost everyone. The American Culture is filled with shadows. We live within a hyper-youth focused society that places a taboo on exposing the realities of death and violence. Yes, we have tons of movies that include violence of death, but far fewer that include the unpleasant realities. A common practice in America is throwing older people into the shadow by placing them into homes. People do this so they do not have to think about or be responsible for aging and death. People don’t mind abandoning their parents and placing them in condition that some have said are slightly better than prison, and some argue are worse. We talk about the number of people that are dying every night on the news but we don’t spend the time to watch the family heal. We don’t spend time focusing on a person’s pain. We don’t spend time understanding what he feels as he slowly dies of either an incurable diseases or worse, a curable diseases that he can not afford to buy the cure for.  We focus on War and the need for more soldiers, but we ignore those who come home with PTSD and missing limbs. We make movies about the glory of violence but almost none about how horrible it is to watch your friend die a messy, bloody, death in front of you, then go home with the memory and try to carry on normally. 

This week, lets meditate on expressing our shadows. Halloween may be the shadow holiday, but it doesn’t have to be the only day of the year we release what we’re holding back.  Consider designating one day week to release any emotion you have held in. If that’s too much, consider one day a month. The point is that one holiday a year isn’t enough. We suppress so much within our culture. There is so much we are made to feel is unacceptable. But that’s a ridiculous mentality. We can learn to accept everything about ourselves.  We must only be willing to remove the blocks. To the best of your ability, look at yourself. Look at your body. Look at your personality. Look at your soul. Make room to see all that which you have fought so hard to suppress in the past. Find all that which you reject about yourself and embrace it. Achieve harmony with your shadow, and you are well on your way to lasting peace.

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