100 Days of Wonder – #29

So, Halloween. So much of Halloween is commercialised nonsense aimed at getting us to buy stuff we don’t need and actually that’s probably how it entered my consciousness really. But I like the dark and the spooky and the other worldly, always have, and Halloween gives me a nice excuse to tap into that and explore what that side of me is and means. I like to think of its origins in Samhain in Celtic pagan culture which marks the end of the harvest season and the start of the darker months. The idea of Samhain or Halloween as a liminal festival where the boundaries between worlds blur speaks to my inner little witch. I suppose we see that closeness to the otherworld reflected in the idea of Halloween as the start of Allhallowtide in the western Christian calendar- a time to remember the dead. I am less keen on the modern interpretation of Halloween as a celebration of horror – because while I am content with a dose of spooky otherworldly magic, I am not and have never been (however hard I tried to pretend as a teenager) a horror fan. Maybe that’s why a Disney Halloween sort of appeals, it allows me to tap into the playfulness and possibilities of other worlds and magic and feed my imagination that keeps asking interesting iterations of ‘what if…?’.