Perhaps something this proud needs a dressing down at least once a year.
Look around at many of the front yards and offices throughout the state during October.
Inevitably, somewhere you will find cardboard or plastic tombstones, often accompanied by grinning, scythe-wielding skeletons eager to reap human fodder for that undiscovered country from which none of us return.
Death and the Grim Reaper, lite.
Halloween has been linked with death for millennia. But the American kandy-korn-eating-grin twist on the old tradition is unique.
Call it a Boo! coupled with a wink and a nod.
But it’s more than that. Ask any psychologist or cultural critic — It’s always more than that, they say.
Some say it’s an ironically sad social or cultural expression of how American culture mostly avoids the thought of death’s inevitability.
“The weirdness is not the existence of Halloween, it’s how we celebrate the other 364 days of the year,” says cultural critic Thomas Leitch of the University of Delaware. “What kind of a culture is it that ignores death the rest of the year?”
An insulated culture, which allows death to take place in sterile hospitals, he says. Or that presents death in a cartoonish fashion on TV and in the movies. And during Halloween.
Actually, death is ignored on Halloween by a couple of its biggest fans, Chris and Barbara Lang of Wilmington.
Their front yard on dead end Wier Avenue — renamed over the front door “Wierd Ave.” for the holiday — is filled with 13 plastic tombstones, 18 white crosses, skulls, body parts, giant spiders, and a homemade coffin complete with a white skeleton. Some of the tombstones shake and moan when you walk by them; one is cracked open by a tiny giggling skeleton.
“It’s not about death,” Barbara says of Halloween. “It’s ghoulish and fun.”
They’re just trying to scare people, Chris says. “It’s a rush to be scared.”
It is, but it begs the question. Why is there a problem with ignoring something we can’t prevent anyway — and that’s such a downer?
“We need to face the opposite of life,” says Dr. Kathleen Gajdos, a grief and death counselor in Chadds Ford, Pa., who also counsels for the Mental Health Association of Delaware.
“Whether we really accomplish this or not during Halloween, I don’t know,” she says. “But it’s a way of playing with the shadow of death.”
Playing is better than completely avoiding, Gajdos says. But it’s still not enough.
“Our culture is very much in denial of death,” she says. “Many griefs are disenfranchised because people don’t want to face loss or death, and so a lot of times you find that grieving people are told by others, ‘get over it.’”
Are grinning skeletons draped over cardboard tombstones American society’s way of saying, “Get over it”?
Ernest Becker, author of one of the most influential books ever written about the subject, “The Denial of Death,” said that, despite our best efforts, death informs every bit of our lives.
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation,” he wrote. “But it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
Despite the mockery, Gadjos says Halloween is important because we contemplate it, even if only superficially.
“It’s kind of a subtle way for people to express some of their concerns in a way they can handle,” she says.
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It wasn’t always this way.
It’s no coincidence that we socially wink at death at just the time the trees are dying, the cold air is biting and the darkness arrives early.
To understand our attitude toward death on Halloween, one must understand its history, says Dr. Joseph Edgette, professor of education and the resident folklorist at Widener University.
Thousands of years ago, Druids living in British Isles celebrated the autumnal equinox on Oct. 31, and called it the festival of Samhain, after their Lord of the Dead, he says.
By the time the Romans took it over, they believed the dead rose from their graves to enter villages in the guise of animals, so they built great bonfires in the town squares to keep them away.
“Once they built the bonfires, some animals still came in, so people decided that in order to fool the spirits, they would dress up in scary costumes,” Edgette says.
When the western world became Christianized, the holiday was tamed, and the two days after Oct. 31 were made holy days. Nov. 1 was proclaimed All Hallow’s (or Saints) Day to remember the saints and, later, Nov. 2 was proclaimed All Souls Day to remember the souls of the dead.
The day before Nov. 1 thus became known as All Hallow’s Eve.
But the church put a new twist on the tradition of dressing up in scary costumes. Instead, one dressed up as a saint and went door to door. In exchange for a ginger cake, the costumed saint prayed for the householder.
This Christian practice slowly reverted to its pagan roots, Edgette says, especially after the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and the grip of Christianity loosened. The costumes became scary again
According to the Census Bureau, more than 36 million trick-or-treaters between 5 and 13 will be knocking on doors this year. That’s a lot of kandy korn, and just the latest manifestation of a very long tradition.
But a curious and intense mix of these traditions recurs each year in the Hispanic celebration of the Day of the Dead.
“Every first and second day of November, families visit the cemeteries and bringing flowers, sit by the tombs and laugh and remember things that they did with the person,” says Gela Petrocelli, a Mexican immigrant and family support service director for the Latin American Community Center.
In Mexico, people bring the things that the dead once enjoyed in life, she says, such as cigars or tequila. And lots of flowers. It’s a strong tradition, especially in southern Mexico.
But in the U.S., Petrocelli says, she only prays during those two days, since her family and ancestors remain buried in Mexico.
Gadjos says that the Mexican Day of the Dead, “with all its ritual, is a lot deeper than what we do in this culture. To have some kind of time when people are at least playing with death is healthy for the psyche.”
Broader American culture prefers distance.
“It’s almost like tempting and daring danger to do something to us,” says Edgette of Halloween’s mockery of death. “We are enamored with our great strengths and feel invulnerable to things, and have this false notion of security and power.”
It is a false notion, of course, if only because death is inevitable.
For all of English poet John Donne’s protestations to the contrary — he’s the guy who wrote the “Death Be Not Proud” poem — nothing can be more proud of itself than Death, the great leveler. The bony dude has a 1.000-percent batting average.
Maybe that’s why he’s grinning.
And maybe that’s why Chris Lang on Wier Avenue will be setting up a table filled with body parts — from legs to hands to eyeballs to brains — this Halloween evening.
To complete the scene, he pushes his own head through the table as though it was disembodied, and talks to the children who dare to visit.
“We’re going to make it look like a meat counter,” he says.
Cool.
Here’s another way to test your mettle, or how you feel about your own death, at least for a brief moment, and safely with your tongue in your cheek.
Go to www.deathclock.com, and put in your birth date, sex, mode of personality (pessimistic, optimistic), body mass index (they provide you the calculator) and whether you smoke.
According to the clock, I’m going to die on Nov. 9, 2035.
I’m OK. Really.
After all, it’s just in fun.