Holiday Reading: Halloween

Well Halloween is a couple weeks gone and we are well into the Thanksgiving hype, but I need to talk about my holiday read for Halloween. This year I read Death Makes a Holiday: a cultural history of Halloween by David J. Skal.

This is a book of essays about different events, history, and paraphernalia of Halloween as we know it today. There were essays on events like, the candy man, Halloween parades, horror films, and haunted houses, along with a short history of the holiday and how witches came to be a symbol of Halloween. All the essays were informative, entertaining, and researched. Skal makes it easy to get into the spirit and see this spooky holiday from an industry and eerie perspective.

I have read other nonfiction books on Halloween and its origins, but this book focuses on the current celebration of Halloween while nodding its head at where we derived these traditions from. I thought the book was fresh and fun.

For those of you who are Halloween lovers or enjoy reading about societal trends, this is a good choice

Squampkins!

While perusing the children’s section a few weeks ago, up popped The Squampkin Patch by JT Petty with a Halloween sticker on the spine and a bunch of pumpkins on the cover. How can an autumn/Halloween lover resist? She can’t. That’s the surprising answer (I know, you’re shocked).  I took it home with me, let it sit around for a week, started reading and then trudged through.

The Squampkin Patch is the story of the Nasselrogt children whose parents go missing in a department store, so the two end up in an orphanage. As fictional orphanages go, this one is pretty typical, save for the fact that the head of the orphanage makes the children work in his zipper factory. Well, Milton and Chloe refuse to become zipper factory workers, so they run away and end up in a small town. There they discover the Argyle house and bakery which are now abandoned, and an extensive pumpkin patch. As Chole and Milton get acquainted with the house and the neighbors, they stumble upon the previous owner’s journal called “The Pumpkin/Chocolate Trials”. From reading, the children discover that the pumpkin patch is actually a squampkin patch, a hybrid pumpkin and squash variety. But the patch seems to purr, and move. There are strange events surrounding the patch. On Halloween night, the children discover that the patch is not only growing, but coming to life and after them.

The writing is indicative of Lemony Snicket’s writing in The Series of Unfortunate Events. The narrator is a bit pompous and, at the beginning, defines words for you. The writing has the stuck up air of Snicket’s works, and considering I’m not a fan of his series, I was not thrilled when I began reading JT Petty’s work. Although I must admit that the book is written well and I think it challenges kids. Milton and Chloe are children that you feel you could meet anywhere and they were easy to read about, but I was not attached to them. The story itself was multifaceted, but I was not compelled by it. My favorite part about the book was that at the bottom of each page was a drawing of a growing squampkin and it was a flip book, so that you could “watch” it grow.

The book was fine, but I almost just put it aside because I did not find the story intriguing and there was not enough mystery and superstition as what I anticipated. If you like The Series of Unfortunate Events, maybe JT Petty’s work will appeal to you, but for me, I’ll avoid it in the future. 

H-A-DOUBLE L-O-W-DOUBLE E-N....

Halloween is magical, at least to me. There's a spellbinding aspect about this holiday that gets me giddy as a school girl. Walking into homegoods stores and seeing the bounty of spooky ceramics, dolls, trinkets, and wall hangings brightens my round little face. The chill in the air and the crisp leaves falling from the skeleton boughs above them are timeless. The change of season is my favorite of the year, but there's one main component that adds to my adoration of this season. Halloween.

Other holidays have lost a lot of their appeal to me. Christmas is taken over by consumerism, St. Patty's by mass alcohol consumption, Easter way too much pastel! But Halloween still retains its age old magic, traditions, and mystery. There's a communion with nature, magic, mystery, terror, spirituality, and the unknown that can never be explained fully or taken away from my love. That doesn't mean I don't want to figure out why I feel this way for my beloved season, so I turn to books.

Lesley Pratt Bannatyne, wrote Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History and gave a well written, concise history of where Halloween came from and how it transformed into the holiday we know and love in contemporary times. The Celts were the first to celebrate what we envision as Halloween. Their Festival of Samhain, lord of the dead, was a late autumn festival during which the Celts celebrated the dead and the beginning of winter, the spirit season. Villagers offered sweets to appease mischievous spirits, or for more harmful, evil spirits, villagers dressed up as ghouls and led a parade out of the village to trick the spirits into leaving. See some similarities? Of course, witches are a major part of the holiday because practitioners were able to practice their craft at a higher level during this spiritual season. Once Christianity came, the leaders of the church put in new holy days where the old pagan celebrations originally set. Thus began All Saints and All Souls Day. People made soul cakes for these days and gave them to the poor. Soon boys and the poor began going door from door begging for soul cakes.

Come colonial times, the pagan traditions were set aside, at least in their out and out format, but harvest festivities and Guy Fawkes day were passable. As religious fervor calmed, the traditions came back and new ones were born. Halloween took on romantic aspects. Girls used superstitions and divination to learn who their future husband would be. Ghost stories were told and came from regional tales and cultural backgrounds.

During the 20th century, Halloween became a national holiday, but the trick part of trick-or-treat became a little too mischievous for communities. In an effort to divert trickster children causing property damage on this night, communities began holding parties for kids. From here, our Halloween parties, trick-or-treating, and the treats, tricks, and costumes all fell in place from the old world, to the new traditions.

Lesley's book was informative without being overly detailed about everything. She didn't use scholarly terms that are such a turn off unless you're doing heavy research. I thought this book was a great source for my Halloween history. I'm still ever so curious about the pagan routes of the holiday. Witches, bats, black cats, fairies, ghouls, and ghosts are the eerie, mysterious part of the season that haunt me and leave me wanting more. It may be a bit early to be thinking about Halloween, but I like to live up the season while it's still around.

The Halloween Tree

Seeing as I'm cheap and prefer to borrow some books from the library, I didn't get Ray Bradbury's book, The Halloween Tree until after Halloween. So much for my Halloween spirit.

Well this book is about young Tom Skeleton and his gang of Trick-or-Treaters. It's Halloween night and the boys go to meet their best bud Pipkin at a strange secluded, squeky house at the edge of town. There they meet Mr. Moundshroud, the eerie Tim Burton-esque man, who takes the boys on a journey to discover why Halloween exists. 

The book was creepy at places, especially as I thought about reading it to a child. It was an easy read and informative. I learned about different celebrations of the dead throughout history and the world. The writing flowed well and the pictures were great. This is a short book and is worth a quick read. I could certainly see a youngish boy liking this one. Perhaps it's the fact that I could see Tim Burton jumping all over this book that made me wary. I didn't have a problem with this book, but if it went on for much longer I don't think I would have felt inspired to continue reading. It wasn't an entrancing read for me, but seeing as this is a children's book, perhaps they would find more worth in the pages.