What Happened To Halloween ?
Finding people still handing out candy for the Kids who are Trick or Treating, has become a scavenger hunt.
Halloween, Was The Second Biggest American Holiday.
What happened to the annual playing of, It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, along with dozens of other classic Halloween movies?
Where was the Flood of TV commercials for Reese's, Almond Joy, Kit Kat, and Snickers?
How did such a vast difference in community participation happen over the last 3 years?
The answers are certainly nuanced, but when you dig into the why, it becomes an obvious pattern that is quite disturbing.
It was only 3 years ago that Halloween as both a Holiday, and an American tradition, still felt like it was fully intact. Our neighborhood was 50/50 with people handing out candy, and the ones that weren't were out collecting it. Last year, it was roughly a quarter of the houses that gave out candy. This year, it was less than 1 in 10 houses, and everybody noticed.
The fact that there has been such a hard decline is odd for a few big reasons. The first and main one being, there is a Pagan revival happening all over the western world, including America. So by all logic, this clearly Pagan holiday with roots in Germanic, and Celtic traditions, should be getting bigger, not smaller. So it makes everyone wonder, why has this particular holiday all but fallen to the wayside in less that 4 years.
This is an ancient holiday that has many names, from Samhain to Hexennacht and Witches Night, to the German der Tag vor Allerheiligen, and all souls day. All across America, The UK, and Europe, this day has a deep history. Some of the traditions that are now part of Halloween, actually date back over 3,000 years. Yet somehow in roughly three years, it has all but vanished.
The Concerted Suppression of European Based Traditions, and Holidays.
We don't have to be told again how many people think that being straight, and white, is the most evil and vile thing that a person can do. So it stands to reason that any Holidays that mainly center around people with children, and come from European traditions, would eventually be attacked as well. Just like we saw with holidays like Thanksgiving in previous years, what we are seeing now with Halloween is the slow phasing out of another long standing annual tradition. One that my family and I, all personally love and have noticed as the drastic decline in the basic participants has been getting worse. For example, the neighborhood where my wife and I are currently living, is the same one we grew up in. The houses out here were once privately owned in a large majority, and very few were marketed or leased as rentals. Now, a majority of the homes are owned by large investment and property Management firms. Then they are rented out both as yearly leases, and in some cases as short term rentals.
The renters, at least most of them, do not seem to participate in any of the communities social events, or even decorate for Holidays. Unfortunately this isn't the only factor taking a toll on holiday participation rates. As we can see already, it's a whole combination of things.
Election, and Political Pop Culture Obsessions.
It seems that these holidays were supposed to be silently phased out, as the new Pop-Culture trends and traditions take over. Nothing European, or anything originating during the initial colonization of the Americas will survive. Between the early phase with the demonization of them, and the later the shift to distractions and finally, the eventual “out of sight, out of mind” trick, they have phased out multiple traditions just like this one.
You have to also factor in the “othering” of half the population. It doesn't matter what political take a person has, or where they get their news. The majority of the media they consume is telling them that the “others” want to cause them harm, and take over their whole country. It's actually gotten to be impossible to avoid these politics, they are now found literally everywhere. Want to listen to a few songs on YouTube sure but here's a political ad… Want to watch the local news, no problem, but the commercials are all politically motivated. Now it has even seeped into sports, and gaming also. You can't get away from it.
How can people feel safe going door to door with their children, when the media has convinced them that they are all either Nazis, Fascists, or communists? That's exactly right, they can't. Then there is another huge factor, and this one may also be playing and equally large role.
Catastrophic Inflation.
The cost of both Candy, and Costumes has gotten absurd, along with the price of nearly everything else. Most people are living on paycheck to paycheck in numbers never before seen in America. Our cost of living, to median income balance is further out of whack now, than it was during the “Great Depression” of the early 1900’s. It wouldn't surprise me if the cost of these costumes and candy, are causing a large portion of the people who are not participating.
I'm not the only one that has noticed this trend. In fact, many of the other parents that we had encountered last night while our son was Trick or treating, had noticed the same thing. Even the prominent personalities like Matt Walsh are noticing.
We have to keep these traditions alive. .
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Keep your Ancestral traditions alive, they kept them for thousands of years, through famines, droughts, and plagues. Don't let them be forgotten because it hurts the “feelings” of less than 1% of the population.
Links and Sources :
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2024/10/30/watch-its-the-great-pumpkin-charlie-brown-halloween/75943668007/
https://youtu.be/Hs6eTCkDOq0?si=VyMG8g6iNWgAaK1A
It seems an irony to me that Halloween and its decline are being lamented by someone who feels himself to be pagan and seeks the European traditions.. Halloween with its costumes and trick or treatery is very much an American invention, to my mind it was invented to surplant the truly pagan tradition of Samhain, which is a different thing ENTIRELY.
Samhain is celebrated in many different ways in many different cultures but essentially is recognising the older tradition that this is the New Year. This is because the older traditiins had the day ending at the end of DAY ie: dusk and the close of day.. the new day would start in darkness.. Similarly the year would start at the Autumnal Equinox. It was believed to be when the veil between the living and our dead ancestors was at its thinnest and we were most likely to be able to make contact with the other realms and our dead ancestors. Also of course that meant that our dead ancestors were more likely to be able to cross into this realm.
The trivialising of this deeply spiritual time into a holiday of over indulgance in sweets and frightening people, in my honest opinion, was an attempt at breaking the genuine Pagan tradition in favour of something vacuous and meaningless. As is the replacement of the Winter Solstices replacement with Christmas.. All born of the greed machine that is devouring our world as we speak.
So by all means mourn the loss of the Anerican tradition if you wish, yes it IS a sign of many things as you have proposed in your article. But please don't forget it's origins if you truly seek your Pagan roots.
I have tried many times to observe Samhain in its traditional manner and to utilise sacred sites to Pagans, only to encounter people throwing fireworks and proudly proclaiming they are stopping the Witches.. well yes they are.. and frankly it's a hate crime to Pagans.
I think covid also played a role in killing Halloween.
When my kids were little I used to sew their costumes. I've made an Apple Cinnamon Cherrios costume, Crumb & Ooblina, Scotty from Star Trek and the Borg just to name a few. When my kids got older we'd decorate for Halloween and my one son would dress up and lay on the lawn as if he were a decoration, and then he'd scare the crap out of the trick or treaters. They'd scream, then run and get their friends to come and have the same thing happen to them. They'd come by each year looking for him until he went away to college.
I miss Halloween. We used to go to a party every year where we'd all bring some type of food cooked in a Halloween theme and just hang out for hours. Then we moved far from there.
Now I live rural where the houses are far apart so no one comes. They all go to the church to "Trunk or Treat" instead.