Well, it is almost Halloween!! :) I have to be honest in that Halloween and Christmas run close to each other in my favorite holidays! I love the whole costumes and scarry feeling of Halloween. I love seeing the kids all out trick-or-treating, taking the kids trick-or-treating, all the decorations, and just the fact that you can wear your own costume and people love it. :) I also love that feeling you get leading up to Halloween. :)
I was thinking, besides what I and the kids should wear, about the coolness of the tradition and the history behind it. Too, I thought this would be a perfect time post about about monsters....I love the whole mystery behind so many things and that scarry wonder about monsters and things that go bump in the night.
Ever watch the series that came on over the weekend at night about Monsters? I think it was actually even called that. Well, sorry I am not doing a better job of describing it. :) I know there was TNT's monster Vision (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158420/), which I really enjoyed, but this was something else. Anyhow, there was a line out of it I really liked..."If the noises in the basement are just mice.....why won't the cat go down there?" :) So cool. Another memory of that basement door mystery was of one of my favorite cartoonists who does The Far Side, Gary Larson. There is a scene where two dogs are sitting facing the basement door and there is a person in the room too sitting down. The one dog looks over at the other one and says "Wanna see something really cool?" That same dog then says "Let's growl at the door and watch what she does". :) Or something like that. :)
But to the subject at hand :)
Here is a nice location to do a little reading about Halloween....
http://www.history.com/topics/halloween
There are so many things that get more than a little twisted by hear-say and this site might help a little with some interesting information. I find it interesting about how we still practice a form of an ancient tradition that dates back 1,000s of years. Back to a time without electric street lights, police patrols, phones, security alarms, radios, tvs...a time with just the night's darkness outside. Dark, ever so dark, cold air, the rustle of leaves, and ever so far between homes. A feeling of isolation and the dark twisted world outside. A time when you and your family were alone unless you lived close to your family in a gathering homes such as a village. When something could scratch at your door in the middle of the night and you would have no way of seeing what it was without opening a slit in the door or window and shining your lamp through it..to see maybe eyes looking at you.
I like too how people who have taken up the traditions have changed Halloween some too over the years. But it has remained the same in the essence of it, that it deals with the unknown, the fabric of existence between here and the afterlife. To think about too how people believed that we grew close to the ethereal or spiritual world during a particular time. Maybe we do, and we have forgotten that along the way. Maybe they figured out something that we have forgotten or chosen to forget. What if Halloween really was a time when the two worlds melded together a little.....
Well, have fun this Halloween..and think about how those cold winds warning of winter's approach, those leafless tree branches rubbing together...those stranges noises in the dark...how that must have been before electricity...and modern conveniences...
