Darkness, Cold, and Horror

 Darkness, Cold, and Horror

By Bobby Neal Winters

Halloween is a time for horror.

It is a dark time.  While the nights will be getting longer until just before Christmas, at Halloween it is just about as dark as it is going to get. Night is yet upon us when we leave for work in the morning as it is upon us again when we go home in the evening.  We wrap it around us like a cloak and hide within it. 

During the summer if we wanted to see the stars, we had to wait until very, very late, but around Halloween--provided the clouds don’t blacken even them out--they are there to see by the time supper rolls around.  While their beauty might provide comfort to some, if you think about it too much, they will help horror to descend upon you. They are reminders that the Earth is a mote of dust in space; we are fragile creatures protected from the many dangers of the universe by an ever so thin layer of atmosphere; one stray asteroid, and we are done for.

It has happened before.

The coming of darkness also brings horror because things happen in the darkness, things we cannot see coming, things we cannot defend against.  If we could see it, we could devise a plan; if we could see it, we could run from it; but we can’t. It’s there hidden in the darkness waiting for us, and there is nothing we can do. 

The name Halloween comes from All Hallow’s Eve. All Hallow’s Day was what we used to call All Saints Day.  From that nomenclature, one might think that All Saints Day came first, and Halloween followed.  The secular scholars will be quick to tell you that Christian missionaries co-opted the pagan holiday creating All Saints Day in reaction to it.  (“Bad missionaries. Go sit in the corner. No supper for you.”)  

For the sake of argument, we can grant that and note we’ve come from a point where we paid bribes to keep kids from over-turning outhouses to giving candy to children dressed as fairy princesses and ninja turtles.  (There are those who say it was human sacrifices in the beginning instead of tipping over outhouses, but that is another argument.)

Darkness is just a part of the horror.  The cold is coming.  We can’t grow our crops in the northerly latitudes, and unless we’ve prepared enough, starvation will come.

Halloween is a time after the harvest is done.  You’ve taken stock of your work and preparations from the previous year.  If you’ve not stored up enough food, death from hunger in the cold awaits.  Here the ignorant have an advantage: if you were just too stupid to plan, then you likely don’t know what lay ahead; if you were smart enough to plan, and the plan didn’t come together, you know the horror that awaits.  You can dread it as it comes.  If you are evil in addition to being smart, you start looking to see which of the neighborhood children is the fattest.

Trick or Treat indeed.

But surely this horror is all in the past?  Surely our knowledge will save us?

I think we’ve all seen these last couple of years that our knowledge is as thin as our atmosphere.  Unless we do a better job of teaching our children, here comes the darkness, here comes the cold, here comes the horror.

Halloween and All Saints Day are an inextricable pair. The Horror of Halloween is in tension against the Hope of the Saints.  Halloween is about the darkness of ignorance; All Saints Day is a witness to the Saints overcoming that darkness.

Now we stare into the darkness.  We know the light will come again. We pray that we will be strong enough to last until that happens.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )