All Hallows: New York

St. Paul's Chapel, Lower Manhattan

I was delighted by how much my photo of St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan reminded me of one of my favorite Halloween albums from my horror-haunted childhood, "Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House."

Chilling AND Thrilling, what a bargain!

They don't really do Halloween in France. You'd think they would, given the Celtic influence of Bretagne (i.e., Brittany, or Breizh in the Celtic-Breton language) which at one time or another spread to (or originated in) Marseille and Iberia. 

But they don't.

I'm sure at least one doctoral candidate in folklore has written a thesis on why not. One obvious answer is that spooky Halloween as Americans know and celebrate it has only the barest origins in the Celtic Samhain harvest festivals. Like the springtime Germanic Walpurgisnacht, Samhain is most known today as the night of the year when celebrants believed that the boundaries between the natural and supernatural worlds were thinnest, allowing creatures from the other side to cross over and vex humankind. Ritual observances such as prayers for the dead, dances, bonfires and offerings could help protect one from evil. It makes sense, then, that as Christianity spread through northern and central Europe, All Hallows or All Saints celebrations to honor Christian saints and martyrs would align with (or appropriate) similar local commemorations.

All of which sends up a few red flags with regards to the tradition's spookiness. There's no doubt that first millennium Europeans believed supernatural forces were at play in the world. But early Europeans would have perceived supernatural phenomena as ever present, with no boundary between the natural and supernatural, and hence no need to acknowledge a liminal day that gave evil spirits a hall pass.

But even considering that, the popular conception of benighted Celto-Germanic cultures, whose seasonal rhythms and day-to-day lives were guided by an omnipresent fear of the supernatural, probably owes more to propaganda efforts by Roman, and later, Christian, authorities who came to dominate the region. More likely, Celts accepted evil spirits as an ever present hazard, and then went on with their lives. After all, Gallup's 2023 poll of religious beliefs found that nearly 60% of Americans believe that the Devil is real, about the same amount as those who believe in the existence of Hell. But except for the occasional spasm of satanic panic that ends up with witch hangings, book and record bans, and long prison sentences for people wrongly accused ritual child abuse, this has almost no influence on American culture.

At any rate, American Halloween stems more from the harvest festival's mumming traditions--where groups of costumed revelers would go door to door performing skits and expected to be repaid with food and booze. Over time, this descended into pranks and hooliganism by underage revelers, which authorities eventually tried to channel into organized trick-or-treating and costume parties. David J. Skal's "Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween" goes so far as to to say that the Halloween sequence from "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944) probably represents the pre-trick or treat era shenanigans pretty well. 

My guess is that the French's reticence to embrace American cultural exports as a form of hegemony helps explain their disinterest in Halloween. Sure they love American jazz, blues, classic rock, hip hop and film, basketball, hamburgers, NASA, the Simpsons, Disney, Coca Cola, all manner of mass-market apparel such as Nike, Converse All-Stars, and New York Yankees baseball caps, skateboards and Steve McQueen. But you have to draw a line somewhere, so why not a kid's holiday where the only point is to have fun?

All hail the Bullitt Hero 50cc. Dinan, Bretagne.

The delightful phonetic Breton spelling, a play on the delightful Breton pastry, the kouign-amann. Dinan, Bretagne. 

There do seem to be some signs of change, though, particularly in the bonboneries that sell sweets, and some of the lower-end, dollar store type places that specialize in seasonal things (e.g., offering costumes and plastic pumpkin tchochkes). And on an everyday basis, there's certainly no shortage of Halloween-caliber imagery over here--probably too much for me to crank out one item per day through October. But just to be sure, over the course of the month I'll pad out the portfolio some of my favorite North American images first, then get to some of the most recent Euro-spook stuff I've gathered.