JONNY RUZZO FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
With each autumn comes inevitable reminders of mortality in our neighbourhood.
I don't mean the cooling days, the fading of the light after equinox, or the trees gradually declining from green to gold to Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs," their skeletal limbs flung up in appeal against the gathering gloom as we face what little remains of the year.
No, I refer to the literal remains: the unidentified human remains scattered across my neighbours' yards like the crumbs of a picnicking Grendel.
Okay, so they are not literal literal human remains, but their plastic simulacra. Even though pumpkins, straw scarecrows and inflatable witches are still the most popular and traditional Halloween decorations, the tone has skewed more to the downright grisly.
Why settle for a mere jack-o'-lantern on the porch, or lopsided construction-paper bats and pumpkins, when you can turn your front yard into a mausoleum, complete with tilting antique gravestones, bony grasping hands and whole skeletons emerging from piles of leaves you never got around to bagging?
I live on the edge of an affluent suburb where the occupants clearly can afford enough Halloween decorations to create the effect of a neighbourhood invaded by an army of slovenly gravediggers who have disturbed the final rest of countless ancestors.
Skulls (some with eyeballs not entirely eaten away) are displayed on white-picket fences, Mr. Kurtz style, or arranged along paths to welcome trick-or-treating kiddies.
For a good part of October, I walk daily past a huge spider web with what appears to be a human baby skeleton in its centre. As I pass another house, I suppress the urge to call 911 to report the large axe murderer climbing along an upper balcony.
In yards strung with bright yellow police tape and festooned with bloody body parts – scattered artfully on the ground or hung from a pine tree like a terrifying tannenbaum – the effect is far more CSI than Charlie Brown.
Don't get me wrong: I love a good haunted house around Halloween as much as anyone. I'm not squeamish, either; in elementary school, my creative-writing assignments dispatched classmates with a sanguinary glee that would have got me suspended and the school locked down in these more risk-averse times.
As a child, I loved being frightened by the local haunted house, and when I was too old to trick-or-treat, I had a great time rigging up phantoms to terrorize children in my turn.
My neighbours have clearly invested their time, effort and creativity in order to amuse the local children. But when I walk by impeccable suburban gardens incongruously strewn with human rib cages and chewed-off limbs, I can't help thinking: What exactly has your bichon frisé been up to?
Halloween has its origins in ancient Celtic harvest rituals that evolved into Christian remembrances such as All Souls' Night, so I accept that it has never been frozen in the past. As it became a popular secular ritual, it borrowed from Gothic literature – Dracula gave us vampire costumes and plastic fangs, Frankenstein supplied neck bolts and green face paint – and popular movies, which introduced zombies, chainsaw massacres and serial killers.
Perhaps this uneasy co-existence of the secular and the sacred is what unsettles me on some deep archetypal level. The older version of the holiday seemed grounded in metaphors from the dying year, and acknowledges life's revolution through seed to flower to fruit to husk and back to seed. This cycle reflects sadness and fear – but also hope, as the cycle begins again.
Fear is not the same as horror, though. Current Halloween decorations don't seem to reflect our reasonable fear of death and loss so much as a more irrational fear (and fortunately, a statistically remote possibility) of not simply dying, but of being chain-sawed or ripped from limb to limb.
Perhaps it is our privileged distance from real suffering that allows us to look at bleeding stumps and decomposing skulls as amusing decorations. Our fortunate insularity, for the most part, from violent death, and even more commonplace death, may make us more likely to focus on the grotesque side: to see dissolution and decomposition as horrible, rather than natural.
Still, I wonder if our remoteness from the cycle that the original holiday marked also leaves us trapped on the wheel, not only dismembered but unremembered – or worse, stuck between worlds like the plastic zombies and skeletons pulling themselves out of our chrysanthemum beds.
I'm not particularly religious – more Pastafarian than Presbyterian – and I have no intention of pooping on a party that is a mostly delightful neighbourhood carnival.
But I still think I will find more spiritual solace from composting my jack-o'-lantern than from tripping over a plastic shin-bone.
Nevertheless, have fun and use the night to indulge in whatever pleasure, philosophy or neurosis your decorations reflect. Just remember, please, to tie up that bichon frisé.
Michele Holmgren lives in Calgary.