No one looks at the Addams Family thinking about how the Addamses compare or contrast with the Manson family the point is how they compare and contrast with an ordinary family.

Of course real good isn’t anything like that either but it’s real good - not real evil - that provides the point of contrast that makes the skewed caricature interesting. Think of the upside-down values of the Addams Family, or Far Side cartoons that deal with the grotesque or uncanny. Far from glorifying evil, it caricatures it in such a way as to pay oblique tribute to the straight and true. Thomas More tells us, 'the prowde spirit… cannot endure to be mocked.' Properly viewed, a jack-o’lantern or a child’s monster mask, like a Gothic grotesque, is not a concession to superstition, but a dismissal of it: It proclaims that we are not afraid. Like the gargoyles and grotesques on medieval cathedrals, these kitchy flattened hags evoke for me what I think of as the best sort of Halloween spirit: a kind of satiric defiance. Myself I actually kind of like them and the fact that some Wiccans find them distasteful fills me with such holiday spirit that I almost want to get one for my own tree. Lately in my area we’ve been seeing those 'flying-broomstick wipeout' lawn props - a witch’s arms and legs wrapped around a tree trunk, pointy hat and broomstick sticking out from behind.

On the other hand, not even the neo-pagans like everything about Halloween. (Anyway, even if there were something to the pagan-origins theory, few Christians would be moved by fears of 'pagan origins' to avoid wearing a wedding ring, or using the proper names of the days of the week and planets.) The trick-or-treating and jack-o’lantern customs come from Catholic Ireland and also Protestant Scotland, and don’t exist outside the British Isles and English-speaking Christendom. I’ve never been able to find any compelling historical evidence that Halloween has ever been anything other than All Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints Day. And of course the neo-pagans are only too happy to try to claim Halloween as their own.īut I’m equally cynical about all of this. Popular Fundamentalist 'histories' of Halloween and of jack-o’lanterns and trick-or-treating attribute it all to paganism (or to Catholicism, which in Fundamentalist eyes can amount to the same thing). Then, of course, there are those who claim that Christians shouldn’t have anything to do with Halloween at all. And these days, with the commercialization of Halloween approaching that of Christmas itself, with outdoor lights, orange and black, and tacky front-yard displays, my cynicism has taken on Scrooge-like proportions. But the older kids with lurid costumes and bloody weapons I find sad and disturbing and by the time the high-school hooligans start coming around with no more concession to holiday tradition than a football jersey and a serious determination to extort candy from me and my neighbors, I’ve got about as much Halloween spirit as a Jehovah’s Witness. Oh, I don’t mind the wee ghosts and goblins on my doorstep with parents in their shadows: pint-sized monsters themselves mustering the nerve to shout 'Trick or treat!' with outstretched pillowcases before retreating to safety.

The day before christmas