One macabre night

Halloween is such a strange holiday. I know the beginnings of this holiday as well as any 8-year old. But it has * evolved.

Halloween started with the celebration of the Catholic feast day, All Saints Day which is November 1. Saints cannot be canonized unless, of course, they are dead. I guess that keeps people honest. You dont want just anybody being saintly their whole life simply because they wanted the title. So, we wait until they are dead, that way we know for sure that they had no agenda.

Anyway, the reasoning here is that on the night before All Saints Day, all the saints come out of their hiding places and roam around looking for the party that the Pope is having in their honor. I guess we living people just want to fit in so we dress like ghosts and various other personifications of dead people: Dracula, zombies, skeletons. Which is weird, because no saint worth his salt would be caught dead sucking blood or terrorizing live people.

So, okay, I get the whole dead-people-roaming-around-on-Halloween thing. But where do the other costumes fit in? What about witches, which are, in essence, the opposite of saints? (And Im talking about the bad witches, here, not the good witches.) How about those cute little bunnies in strollers? What about the ninjas and fairy princesses?

Are we to assume that some saints had black cats? Or does a black cat simply mean that a witch is around? Im pretty sure that is just a superstition. If so, then why doesnt anyone carry a ladder over their heads on Halloween? Or throw salt hither and yon?

Instead we bob for apples, carve pumpkins, and yell trick or treat at every door that has a light on beside it.

I know that trick or treat used to mean that if you didnt give a box of Nerds to a kid decked out in Superman gear, hed play a trick on you. Maybe, but the only trick I ever heard of was knocking over someones outhouse. I dont think this is an issue anymore.

Still, I dont want to take any chances with my toilet facilities, so I always throw a treat into the bag. It feels very much like being mugged by a guy in a ski mask. Apparently, either muggers are getting shorter these days or else they dont make Superman costumes for tall muggers. Anyway, it doesnt seem very saintly.

Another tradition of Halloween (or All Hallows Eve) is for teenagers to forego any costumes and arm themselves with toilet paper and shaving cream. Neither of these items were available when the majority of saints were signed up. So where did that come from? Somehow Halloween has evolved into the night when you can get revenge on someone for any injury, physical or otherwise that was done to you throughout the rest of the year. I havent done the research that would tell me what the criteria for sainthood is, but it seems unlikely that a saint would be required to do that.

I think that the whole concept of canonizing people for sainthood was a good one. I believe that whoever came up with that idea intended to encourage people to live a good life. I believe also that there was a need to have a feast day to honor these dead people, because there was no way to honor them when they were alive.

Still, I dont think they realized what kind of trouble these saints would cause when they came back from the dead one night a year. And Im pretty sure that they didnt envision what Halloween has now become: A very dysfunctional holiday.

" You can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her Web site www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her new book.