Halloween is starting to mirror the trend of renaming "Christmas " with generic "Holiday", and provides a commentary on religion's role in what I call "holidayization". Multi-culturalists, attracted by Halloween's size and high visibility, have made it their latest subject to be downsized for the sake of diversity and inclusion. Their recommendation is now to view Halloween as one of a plurality of observances that are all supposed to be crowded together in October. We've seen the idea take form in December that if a holiday like Christmas is considered too dominant, it mustn't stand alone, but must be augmented by other supposedly equivalent holidays and be partaken as a kind of melange. Whereas December is now regarded as a kind of vortex attracting holidays with certain themes in common, like candles and gift giving, October is now viewed as a magnet attracting holidays with a death and spirits theme in common. A search for observances didn't have to go very far because Mexico's Los Dias de los Muertos comes soon after Halloween. This November holiday should naturally be encouraged wherever there are communities of Mexican extraction . But one additional holiday wouldn't really be enough to make the necessary point. Therefore they are moving two other holidays from further away on the calendar to join Halloween, Obon from Japan, and Pchum Ben from Cambodia.These observances occur in August and September.

 

Added together all these holidays represent four months, or one third of the calendar. Transplanting a summer holiday into the later part of fall would seem weird if it was a holiday I was used to celebrating. But disregarding and compressing calendars isn't weird for multi-culturalists. August's Obon and September's Pchum Ben could always be promoted as public observances and left to their own devices in their slots on the calendar, but there they wouldn't be much appreciated by the general public or attract much attention. Halloween on the other hand, has a long history of high visibility in America and people are primed for something dark and other-worldly in October.

 

Other less known observances can take advantage of Halloween when they are brought into Halloween's ready spotlight. As with Christmas and it's entourage of other observances ( Chanukah, Kawanza, Solstice, etc.) Halloween provides the setting and inspiration for minority observances to be promoted in the public arena and to be less on the margins. Halloween is expected to share it's spotlight chivalrously even though it stands to gain nothing, and to lose considerably. As with Christmas, multi-culturalists work on Halloween takes on striking form in public schools. "Arts Edge - National Arts and Education Network" has a slogan for October, "Not Just Halloween". It and "Marco Polo Educational Foundation" advocate using festivals of the dead as a framework for discussing with students how observances concerning the afterlife are manifested around the world. Instead of children experiencing the simple joy of a Halloween parade, they are expected to compare and contrast Halloween with other observances with which Halloween shares only the death motif, only one of Halloween's many facets. Children are missing out on exposure to an important part of American cultural history because Halloween, even more than Christmas, has attained an unparalleled flowering in America. << back | continued >>