Call it seasonal disorientation syndrome, but I’ve been reading about Halloween. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one thinking about it. Stores will begin Halloween displays next month, if the usual pattern recurs. So why not do a little advanced study? Although I’ve written about holidays myself, they’re unruly subjects to handle. Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is a name familiar to many fans of Halloween. Her 1990 book Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History kickstarted renewed interest in the holiday and has been followed by other studies, even occasionally with academic presses. Still, holidays are difficult to pin down. One of the most obvious reasons for this lies in the fact that before the world became über-connected, holidays were largely local celebrations. Trends traveled slowly and not everybody agreed on which holidays to celebrate.
The early days of Halloween are the most difficult to piece together. This is clear in Bannatyne’s book also; we simply don’t have the written sources we’d like. The ancient Celts, although great strides have been made through archeology and close examination of ancient writings of outsiders, remain poorly documented. They didn’t leave archives like the classical writers of Greece and Rome did. And clearly Halloween has its earliest known celebration as Samhain among the Celts. Once Bannatyne gets to America, however, there’s a trove of information in her book. Her chapter on the celebrations among the original thirteen colonies is quite good at demonstrating regional differences not only for religions, but for tolerance for something like Halloween. Fall festivals predated Halloween as we know it (if we really do know it), and she does a good job of demonstrating how the melting pot effect made Halloween national.
One of the problems with any history is that one event can change everything. This book was written three decades before Covid-19 and the pandemic was one of those events that did change everything. It makes it seem as if we were much more carefree back in the eighties when Bannatyne’s book was written. Halloween was just starting to become an adult holiday again back then. In the ensuing years it has become even more so. Communities are seldom what they used to be with the extreme mobility of much of our society, but many still find a way to agree to the terms of Halloween. Historians of holidays have a difficult task, and we’re still learning about ancient cultures and their modern manifestations. This is a good book to start that exploration—I know it taught me a thing or two.
