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Some Thoughts: I love Halloween. I always have. I wrote Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History because I couldn't find the whole Halloween story in any other book available at the time (1986). The more I learned, the more fascinating the holiday got for me. A Halloween Reader. Poems, Stories and Plays from Halloweens Past (2004) got me to think about Halloween as it was imagined over the past four centuries, and gave me new respect for emotional and poetic depth inspired by this "night of all nights of the year." (Poe) A Halloween How-To was just plain fun from begining to end. I spent a year and a half living Halloween day in and day out. In the fall, I traveled to as many Halloween events as I could pack in. During the rest of the time I corresponded with and met with people in the business: home haunters, costumers, scholars, occultists, pro-haunters, make-up artists, theater artisans, pumpkin-growers, vampire-lovers, electricians and fake tombstone artists to name a few. My freezer was filled with pumpkin from December through June so I could test recipes. I carved foam gargoyles in January and made dry ice experiments in the basement in June. The ideas in the book are aimed mostly at adults who I hope will have as much fun with the holiday as I do. |
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A Halloween How To: Costumes, Parties, Decorations, & Destinations. Lesley Bannatyne; Pelican Publishing Co., 2001 Order
from amazon.com From Booklist From a sociological history
of Halloween and its contemporary traditions to a guide to
the ideal sound effects to make your party creepy (think
Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries), this how-to offers
everything anyone would ever want to know about All Hallows
Eve. Bannatyne takes us through decorating houses, yards,
and ourselves; planning a killer Halloween party; embarking
on must-see Halloween pilgrimages (don't miss the Punkin
Chuckin' Contest in Morton, Illinois); and preparing
Halloween cuisine ("beyond blood punch"). Bannatyne's
anecdotes and lifelong obsession with Halloween give the
book a readable quality in spite of the lengthy lists and
detailed how-to information. This will be a useful reference
for both the growing population of adults who revel in
Halloween and folks who seek to make the trick-or-treat
experience a little more harrowing for unsuspecting children
in costume. If nothing else, those who follow this book
carefully are sure to win every Halloween contest they
enter, whether dressed as an out-of-work superhero or a
giant post-it note. |
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DEDICATION A Halloween How-To is dedicated to the beautiful beads on either side of me: my late mother Janet Young Richardson, my father David R. Bannatyne, and my daughter, Magdalena Bannatyne Bay. I feel exquisitely beautiful. I'm wearing black tights and a leotard, two black-felt ears, and a four-foot-long tail made from a stocking stuffed with newspaper. I have on mittens and my mom's high heels. At eight years old, I'm radiant as I walk with my friends in the smoky dusk of late October. From out of nowhere Dennis Polaski appears, dressed as Zorro. He grabs my head by my cat ears and kisses me. Right on the mouth. Then he's gone, giggling, into the shrubbery that edges the split-level homes in suburban Connecticut. It is breathtaking. I teeter on the edge of Mrs. Kinney's porch steps, reeling with sudden adoration for a nine-year-old wearing a painted mustache and black plastic cape tied up with a shoelace. Mrs. Kinney answers the door.
"Yes?
Samhain, according to ancient Irish sagas, was the time that creatures from the Otherworld made themselves visible. Some historians conjecture that Druids used divination to communicate with the spirit world at this time. They read omens in the sky, water, and fire to decipher the wisdom of a proposed migration, the right time to make magic, the cure for sickness. No one will ever know for certain the details of the Druids' rituals. But we do know that Halloween's association with ghosts, fire and fortunetelling may have beuan with these pagan tribes somewhere between 2000 and 3000 years ago. When Christianity swept through the Roman Empire, Celtic and Roman celebrations were recast in a Christian light and a series of church holidays eventually took the place of Samhain: All Hallows or All Saints' Day (November 1), and All Souls' Day (November 2). All Hallow's Eve became All Hallowe'en, then simply Halloween. Rents were often due on Samhain/All Hallow's, and the young Irish men who worked abroad for the summer (in Scotland or England) came back to their homes that day. Families reunited, and as the dead were an intrinsic part of any Irish family, they were part of the homecoming celebration. The people of the British Isles kept their Halloween traditions alive through telling ghost stories and playing games. They used apples or nuts to divine the future rather than animals or omens in the sky, and asked the spirits about matters of love, rather than questions of survival.
By the 1950s, Halloween was synonymous with trick or treating, and the next two decades were its American salad days: nearly every child in the nation celebrated Halloween both at school and in their neighborhood. Soon, adults were back on the scene, and by the 1990s Halloween had ballooned to the second largest retail holiday, right after Christmas. After more than two millennia, the holiday still captivates us. A Halloween How-To sets out to get a snapshot of Halloween today, or rather, several, as the holiday has as many faces as a pumpkin patch in October. It's where you'll find answers to a myriad of Halloween questions: what is the difference between a goblin and a ghoul? where can you find a decent set of fangs? what's Monster Mud? how do you stage a seance? what's the recipe for fake blood? pumpkin soup? where can you see Elvira? Freddy Kruger's glove? a life-size replica of Frankenstein in his original movie costume? In these pages you'll find hundreds of Halloween anecdotes, formulas, recipes, how-to's, history, and ideas. Ideas for costumes, parties, indoor and outdoor decorations, movies to rent, cd's to play, good food to cook, unique Halloween destinations and fun things to do. Besides how-to's and ideas for celebrating, A Halloween How-To also details what Halloween customs mean, where they come from, and what purpose they serve today, since how-to often leads to but-why? Halloween 2001 This Halloween I watched a bulky satyr-like figure walking-no, strolling-up 6th Avenue in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade. Nude. He'd painted his body silver and wore the giant head of a goat. The eyeholes were shining with red light as if there were fire inside his skull. The crowd cheered for him-a pagan icon recast in the glass and concrete of a modern city. The woman in front of me strained against the barriers to watch the naked goat god as he slowly faded into the night. Come next morning, for all we know, he could be back selling coffee at Starbucks. An hour later I stood on a subway platform in Manhattan. A man next to me was wearing a set of wings and a sequined tiara that rose up twice the height of his head. On another day he'd seem like a perverse Tinkerbell, but it was Halloween. On Halloween he was beautiful. That 's a terrific costume, I said. He nodded demurely. "I love
Halloween," he admitted. "Halloween is my last big fling
before winter. It's like opening up he fireplugs in the
summer."
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There are so many good Halloween history resources now that it's hard to capture all of them here. Instead, |
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There are so many good
Halloween history resources now that it's hard to capture
all of them here. Instead, I'll recommend a few: I
especially like the Halloween chapter in Ronald Hutton's
Stations of the Sun; Isaac
Bonewits' web
article, "The Real History of Halloween," and Jack Santino's Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and
Life. |
