Why pagan

holidays rule

Judy Rebick, former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of women and co-host of the CBC Newsworld weekly debate show Face-Off, has been speaking out on social issues in Canada for more than two decades. But believe it or not, Rebick is not the prototypical humourless leftist; she has opinions on many things far less weighty than social democracy. Below, she explains why every other holiday in the calendar year pales in comparison to Halloween.

My favourite holiday has always been Halloween. I know that's kind of weird because we don't get a holiday from work on Halloween, but when I was a kid--a Jewish kid--Halloween was the only holiday I really felt part of. It's the only truly child-centred holiday we have.

The fact is that the most important holidays of the calendar year--Christmas and Easter--are Christian religious holidays. And that's even more the case in Canada than in the United States. I lived in New York City until I was 10 before moving to the north end of Toronto, and Canada was a very Christian country then: I had never exposed to anti-Semitism until I came to Canada. Even now, Canada has a much stronger Christian culture than the U.S. does. Down there, the major holidays have been secularized. Even Easter has a secular edge in the U.S. as a generic celebration of spring; for me, Easter meant pouring into the streets for the New York City Easter parade. When I came to Canada, the difference was huge.

Of course Christmas is a Christian holiday too, but besides having a specific religious origin, it has become so commercial that it seems to have become as much a hardship on families as a support. Most people are more likely to get depressed at Christmas than on Halloween, either because they have to go into debt or because they feel terrible about not being able to afford gifts. Nobody's stressed at Halloween, except for the grumps who live around the block and who don't like having kids ring their doorbell.

Then there were my religious holidays, the Jewish ones, which I didn't enjoy either. Rosh Hashanah was no fun when you were a kid, because all you did was sit in a Synagogue all day. And Yom Kippur in my family was a mess. My mother would fast, so she would be in a horrible mood all the time. Meanwhile, my father didn't believe in any of that, so he wouldn't fast. He'd go out and eat. Then he'd come home to my mother, who was surly because she hadn't eaten. The only Jewish holiday I liked was Passover, because that was when we feasted. But even Passover wasn't the same after we moved to Canada, because my grandparents were no longer around.

When you think about it, the only truly secular holiday on the calendar is Thanksgiving, which is a celebration of the harvest. But I have been a city kid all my life, both in New York and in Toronto, so the idea of the "harvest" didn't really mean all that much to me. And when we moved to Canada my parents kept celebrating American Thanksgiving, which is in late-November instead of mid-October, so I was out of the loop again. And I don't like American Thanksgiving because they've made it very patriotic--it's about the pilgrims, it's got that crude American patriotism that's kind of nauseating.

By contrast, Halloween was the only holiday I didn't feel left out of. It's a pagan holiday, but it's been almost completely secularized. On Halloween we experience a sense of community in the big city. Kids go door-to-door, everyone pretends to be scared by the two-year-old witch and the four-year-old goblin and we feel like a community again.

And it didn't matter how poor you were. Almost everyone can afford to give out a few candies or a few apples, and homemade costumes are usually more fun than the store-bought kind. And you can let your imagination run wild. Once, my six-year-old niece dressed up for Halloween as Fidel Castro, cigar and everything. (I don't know where she got that idea from.) Halloween is fun, it's fantasy, it's about some kind of netherworld--and that's part of the human imagination. In our corporate consumer culture, it's fascinating to celebrate the imagination, especially in a way where your imagination isn't limited to what you can wrap in a box and put under a tree.

No one ever struggles with the angst of whether we have lost the true meaning of Halloween. I know everyone talks about why we can't have the spirit of Christmas all year round. I myself think the spirit of Halloween is what we need more.

--from an interview with Philip Preville