“The creepy spiders need to be lower. Kids are short, They need to turn their head and be looking directly into those red eyes.”

“You are normally such a sweet person. What happens to you at Halloween?”

“Being scared is what Halloween is all about?”

“I thought it was about the candy.”

“Nah, it’s about conquering your fear. The candy is just a side benefit.”

We get a little carried away at our place in late October, not as much as we did when we had a house with a front lawn and bushes to turn into spider webs and ghosts. We gave a lot of stuff away when we downsized to a condo, but not the creepy spiders nor the orange lights. I still dress up, usually in my wizard costume, hat, robe and staff. I have a wooden staff, but a couple of years ago one of my kids gave me a plastic one with an egg on top that lights up in different colors, which is a hit with the little ones.

The name Halloween came from Hallow Evening, the night before All Hallows Day. Hallows were saints and the European medieval Christian church wanted people to go to church to revere the saints and martyrs of the faith on November 1^st and again on November 2^nd All Souls Day, to revere all who passed in the faith and commit to living a holy life in their honor.

Most now realize that the church chose this particular day to celebrate the dead to coincide with the ancient Celtic pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced Saw-when in Gaelic).

The Celts were an ancient people spread across all of Europe. They were the Gauls that Caesar fought, the Galatians that Paul wrote to, the Helvetii of Switzerland, and many other clans. The remaining “Six Celtic nations,” where you can still find their cultural influences, and languages, are Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, and the Isle of Man”

The Celts were a primitive pagan people. They were pastoral/ agricultural, raising sheep and cattle and growing fodder and vegetables. Celts divided time by dark and light. Days began and ended at sundown. Winter was the dark start to the year, summer the light. Samhain was the end of the last harvest and the beginning of the dark time of year. It was New Year’s Eve.

Samhain was also a time when the barrier between this world and the Otherworld was thin. The spirits of the dead, especially the recently departed, came home to say last goodbyes. That was OK as reverence for your ancestors. Grampa’s ghost might be a little pale, but he was still Grampa. Other people’s ancestors? Screamy woman? Recently executed murderer? Not-so-much reverence as fear.

So the Celts put out food for their pale peeps and scary decorations to keep the others away. They burned bonfires, danced in the streets, and mastered fear through partying. The Church coopted the reverence for the dead, and tolerated the party, Happy Halloween.

“Trick or treating,” or gangs of costumed kids demanding candy in lieu of getting your windows soaped or your yard decorated with toilet paper was an American invention, now exported to some other places in the world. Just kidding about the  extortion racket part; we do have some scattered  “Devil’s Night” vandalism, but the whole holiday has turned into a neighborhood fancy dress party with parents dressing up and going around with little ones.

Halloween is a time to have pseudoscary fun, meet your neighbors, and overdose on sugar. There was a time when some houses used to hand out fruit or home baked goods or bags of popcorn, but then someone started rumors of razorblades in apples and hippies handing out marijuana brownies and now the only things parents view as safe are prepackaged products of Mars and Hershey.

Costumes are a reflection of pop culture, lots of Disney princesses, Marvel superheroes and Harry Potter characters. My wizard costume predates the JK Rowling classic, but everyone calls me Dumbledore.

There are a few costumes, that are truly scary, home-made zombies asking for brains, vampires with real looking teeth, light gray palor, and bloodshot eyes asking for a “donation,” and teenagers in Jason hockey masks from the Halloween movie series, or Freddy Kruger claws from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

Some people, like my wife and me, enjoy being scared. Horror movies, and authors like Stephen King exist for people like us. We love a suspenseful story, where the dead come back to life eating the brains of those struggling to get by after the Apocalypse. When the story is over, I look around at our deteriorating world and its problems seem more solvable.

Not everyone feels this way. Billie and I share the experience of emotionally scarring our youngest children by taking them to a horror film with their older siblings, she Cujo, me Nightmare on Elm Street. One of them has forgiven the infraction.

I’m not sure if a love of the horror genre really helps me face my fears.

I do things that stretch my tolerance for feeling uncomfortable, going up in a hot air balloon, parachuting, and mountain climbing for fear of heights. I’m not really afraid of heights, nor even falling from heights. I do worry about landing after falling.

Most of the other things that make me uncomfortable are really easy to rationalize. Getting old? What choice do I have? Dying? It happens to all of us sometime? Not being loved? I am truly fortunate and grateful.

I try to help some others face some of what scares them. So if a very small Spiderman freaks out at our red-eyed creepy spiders, a kindly old wizard is there to say,

“He doesn’t bite. His eyes are red because he’s tired. He would really like it if you pet him, Mr. Spiderman.”