It starts earlier and earlier every year. This year it began two months ago — a full quarter year before the event. I’m talking about the merchandising promotion of Halloween. The amount of time, money, and energy people are now spending on Halloween has reached ridiculous proportions — and manifestations. In a leafy residential neighborhood with muti-million-dollar single-family homes near my parish, people for some reason feel compelled to decorate their lawns with bloody dismembered vampire babies and other grotesque spectacles. Friends of mine tell me they can’t walk their toddlers down certain streets for fear of how certain images will affect their children. What are people who hang bloody effigies of babies in their front yards thinking? What message are they trying to convey? What is the purpose of such disgusting displays? What does Halloween mean to them?
The more the sense of the true meaning of a holiday is lost, the more people overcompensate with an extended orgy of shopping, decorating, consuming. They are trying to evoke some sort of feeling from it — but the vacuousness of the effort, lacking any deeper significance, only engenders a fleeting emotional experience that ultimately leaves people empty. That’s the reason for the “post-holiday blues.” After an extended meaningless observance of a holiday, it’s natural to wonder: What was the point of it all?
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