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Halloween Odalisque
I was really too old to partake in Halloween when I arrived in Canada as a teenager. The strange ceremony wasn’t widely observed in the England of my childhood. We had Guy Fawkes Night, a political observance of the failed 1605 Catholic “Gunpowder Plot” to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Palace of Westminster. Otherwise known as Bonfire Night, the tradition is perhaps a reminder to serfs where treason will get you. Remember, remember, the 5th of November!
Guy Fawkes, the explosives expert, was burned in effigy in every yard. Fireworks added to the smog. The National Health took care of burn victims.
I didn’t really understand the purpose of Halloween, other than, it seemed to me, to extort candy from random neighbours … which was good enough cause in itself. And it had fireworks.
Myself and two of my new Canadian friends had bought — or rather, prevailed on our parents to buy from Woodward’s — hooded jackets with long, brown polyester nap and fluorescent orange lining.
On a cold, clear evening, we knocked on doors in our New Westminster neighbourhood. The irony! There we stood clutching large brown paper bags, dressed identically in our faux fur hoodies.
We were greeted with variations on “Aren’t you boys a little old to be trick-or-treating?” Most often the question was “And what are you guys supposed to be?”
“The Three Bears,” we replied in unison.
In succeeding years, Halloween parties got boozier and weirder, in that order. I noticed that attendees of these creepy costume events often dressed up to illuminate some repressed or barely concealed aspect of their persona.
At one such wild do in the Kootenays, it seemed as though everyone was simply wearing their most ridiculous conceits writ large: the insufferable hippy “spiritual leader” dressed as a monk, the local seductress as a hooker, and so on.
I had come as myself, or idealized, heroic self, dressed in my tweed climbing knickers and parka, with a bandoleer of carabiners and pitons around my chest. Luckily, I hadn’t brought my ice axe, because, as the night progressed, I got into a fist fight with a guy who had fallen for “the hooker.”
I spent the wee hours in Invermere Hospital having my head sewn up, which had been used by the bouncers as a battering ram to open the exit doors.
That was exactly forty-years ago. I attended perhaps one or two more Halloween parties after that, where I noticed again that the ritual tended to unleash people’s demons.
Speaking of demons, a few years back an army of teenagers declared war on our house. The attack began with a battery of Roman candles aimed at the front of the house, culminating in an explosive device, improvised with a plastic pop bottle filled with an accelerant, wired to our basement door.
Knowing the gang and their adult enablers, an RCMP officer offered his sympathy. “Oh, you do have a problem.” Despite photographic evidence (I’d captured one of the perps on film), that was the extent of the intervention.
We moved shortly afterwards.
The Halloween tradition, I understand, dates back to the autumnal Celtic Festival of Samhain and beliefs surrounding the dead and divination. It has its parallel in the Mexican Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), which I’d love to photograph. Otherwise, I’m nonplussed by the superstitions they represent and the commercial exploitation that has attached itself to them.
I don’t like horror movies either.