Halloween in America 2012

Gerard Vanderleun writes at American Digest: "If you've noted, as I have, the increasing lust for gruesomeness in costumes at every new Halloween, you might have reflected that dark humor has taken a back seat to darker fascinations." He writes about having been in Spain on All Saints Day, one of the holiest days of the Spanish year. He and his girl friend were trying to hitch a ride, and car after car of Spanish families drove right by them. "The Spanish tradition on this day is for the whole family to load up the car with flowers and other offerings and haul off to the local graveyard for a visit and picnic with the dearly departed." "These people still had the one thing that more and more Americans lack at the core of their lives: a belief in something greater than themselves, a belief in something greater than man, greater than death." "What the empty among us are compelled to do when confronted by death is a bit of mass-culture symbolic magic. We dress as what we fear most, and we deck our halls with symbols of death and decay." "In my neighborhood in Seattle many don't believe in anything sacred other than, at best, Obama. Their entire belief system centers on that tin god then on themselves and their "only one life to live, live, live!." All of which makes for an empty skin sack of existential desolation that they try to fill every Halloween with the greatest of American secular concepts: fun. "Fun" is a curiously American concept that seems to have begun its invasion of all aspects of our shared life shortly after the end of WWII. I suppose that after the Great Depression and the war, the nation felt it could use a little fun. And, as usual, that great American axiom, "If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing," came into play. Nowhere do we see the idea that life should be "fun" pumped up into bigger balloons of pure vanity than on Halloween." Vanderleun concludes, "There really is no bottom. Is there?" Read more here: http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/hitchhiking_in.php I would only add to this that the vehicle for achieving this "fun," is sugar. In recent years more and more medical and nutrition experts have explained to us the dangers inherent in sugar. The drastic rise in obesity is an epidemic. The economy may be bad, but you would never know it when you observe how much money is being spent on sugar treats this month.