Hey-Hey for Halloween!!!

Because Halloween is clearly the awesomest holiday of the year, I thought I'd take a moment to celebrate its unparalleled awesomeness in a space devoted to celebrating such things.

Witness the power of Halloween. Above is a picture of my nieces. Two well-behaved, sweet and adorable children on most days of the year, all it took was a package full of random Halloween goodies from their Aunt Sunny to turn them into maniacally grinning little witches impishly intent on testing the limits of their tolerance of sugar and food coloring.

Evidently, Halloween evolved from pagan Celtic roots into an event with deep religious significance, but since I just bored myself senseless trying to bone up on my Halloween history, I will not relay that history here. Because what makes Halloween so awesome is that Halloween is so damned much fun.

And it's not just because Halloween serves as an excuse for children and adults alike to ingest staggering quantities of "fun-sized" candy bars. Or because kids in costumes--even the greedy, demanding ones--are so amazingly cute. Or because it's a night when a certain kind of woman feels inspired to dress as a slutty version of a public servant and a certain kind of man always, ALWAYS dresses in drag.

It's because on Halloween, we open ourselves up to the possibility that there might be more to our world, and to ourselves, than meets the eye. As the only carnivalesque event that the U.S. celebrates on a nationwide scale, it also serves a crucial social function--by encouraging excess and turning things topsy-turvy, it facilitates a necessary release of potentially destructive or disruptive energies and restores things to their proper equilibrium. (Humans need these kinds of social rituals in order to keep things running smoothly and used to have them frequently. Many of the holidays we celebrate in the U.S. could be fairly understood as the neutered remnants of these events.)

Plus, it's one of the few opportunities we have to collectively celebrate the unbridled power of the human imagination in a country where imagination is undervalued except to the extent it can be exploited--and where the occult imagination is demonized when it isn't ignored. On Halloween, we let ourselves believe, however briefly, that whatever we can imagine, we can somehow manifest. Limits are transcended. Minds are opened.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how newness enters the world.

So hey-hey for Halloween, when all the witches can be seen! Some are black and some are green!

And they are all awesome.