Time to Reset
Welcome to the holiday season, our annual six-month exercise in decorations, costumes, movies, music, reunions, parties and sensory overindulgences. Whether we ardently join in their festivities or merely tolerate their intrusion in our schedule, they affect us in ways more deeply felt than we often realize. They give us much to anticipate and celebrate, breaking up each 365 day trek around the sun into observances that influence our moods, our rituals, our spending habits and our social engagements. I’m sure you look forward to and enjoy some more than others. But it’s hard to deny or avoid getting caught up in the festivities and expectations that each of these cultural traditions adds to our living.
Thanksgiving invites us to consider our blessings more than our hardships, all the while beckoning us to reunite with those most dear in our families. Christmas rekindles the magic of childhoods we once enjoyed and long to preserve while urging us to be kind and generous, if only for a season. New Years revives that Janus perspective that moves us from the joys and regrets of one age now spent to the hopes and resolutions of one yet to be discovered. Valentines Day brings us a flirtation with romance and affection to take our mind off winter’s lingering grip. And Easter elevates the restorative power of springtime, inspiring our hopes that life, like nature, will be reborn again.
I mention these five because they are different than those holidays that remember notable people or celebrate their labor and sacrifice. Each of the five has its’ own look, aromas, tastes and sounds that we eagerly incorporate into our decorative and culinary routines. And all of them have been thoroughly co-opted by enterprising commercial interests upon which yearly profit margins depend. It is hard to imagine life in America without holidays and their ever-lengthening marketing seasons that so thoroughly drive our spending and social habits.
Conspicuously absent from my list is the celebration that is foremost in our minds this week: Halloween. As a kid I think I liked it almost as much as Christmas, for it checked off all of those markers that made it fun and memorable for me. It was scary, it gave me permission to wear disguises, it took place in the dark, and it gave me license to overdose on sugar via my favorite chocolate and peanut butter delivery systems. I must admit that Halloween still awakens my juvenile delight in assuming a macabre persona to frighten unsuspecting trick-or-treaters who come a’calling at my door.
It was only later in life that I understood the spiritual energy that lay behind it. Well before the American night of ghoulish mayhem became normative in our land, “all Hallows eve” was an occasion focused not so much on itself as on the day after, All Saints Day. Many churches still observe November 1st as a day of holy remembrance for those who have passed on to their glory during the past year. Halloween was the evening before this sacred day, when earth was hallowed—or made holy—by those, now departed, whose virtuous and saintly lives had helped goodness triumph over evil. Over time our more secular culture elevated Halloween to become that once-a-year night when all hell could break loose before sanity, civility and normalcy would prevail once again. Not surprisingly, the “een” before the time of hallowing continues to pique more of our interest and spur more of our spending profligacy than the calmer, business as usual routines that must follow.
Beneath the shot of adrenalin each of these holidays injects into our economy lies an element of ancestral wisdom that, whether recognized or not, nonetheless speaks to our hearts. Each of them gives us the opportunity—should I say excuse—to take stock, clean house, and start over. Halloween clearly satisfies this ancient yearning, even for our modern, secular society. It stirs up our fascination with the dark side, keeping us one step ahead of zombies, and one bite away from those children of the night who don’t share our uneasiness with blood-borne pathogens. But when the ghouls and specters have gone back into retreat at light of day, life goes on and the world continues, until the next reset.
The word, reset, or if you prefer, reboot, seems to fit what the six holidays I’ve mentioned mean to us. Most if not all of them serve as cultural reset buttons that we gladly push over that span of time when the warmth and fertility of the temperate months give way to winter’s darkness, dormancy, and death. You may think it a bit of a stretch to view them this way. Yet for some reason we seem to need these periodic re-starts and re-boots to make it through each year. They probably emerged during our first ancestral awakenings to the seasonal rhythms and cycles of the northern hemisphere. I suspect they also emanate from places deep in the human psyche that seek to mediate past and future, birth and death, heartache and happiness, fear and hope. Perhaps Carl Jung was right in postulating that we share a collective unconscious with all other people, a species-wide memory that holidays like Halloween keep alive in all of us.
If Halloween and the other holidays I’ve mentioned provide us with a chance to reset ourselves for a time, then they perpetuate values and sustain meanings that commercialism alone can’t fully explain or satisfy. That they help bond us to one another within a neighborhood or across a nation is not to be doubted. That they provide us with cathartic moments, albeit safe and nonthreatening ones, seems far more likely to me. And if through each of these resets we gain the means to let go and start over, to review and rethink, to reunite and recommit, then their importance to us may far outweigh the aggravations and stresses they inevitably add to our living.
May you have a happy Halloween! And more importantly, a blessed and restorative All Saints Day.
