Why we love Halloween

So instead of taking the wedding dress on a trip, we decided to let it celebrate Halloween. This was my favorite holiday for years and years. As a child I would spend a month  planning decorations and costumes. Fall was, and is, my favorite season...and this is the best holiday of fall. 

This year was fun. We handed out candy at work and at home, and tried to explain the process to the newfy (yes kids come to the door, we do not scare them and we give them candy).  We carved pumpkins and cooked the seeds. We laughed about how fun it was to run around in the dark as kids.

This was the closest I ever came to having a religious experience as a child. Halloween comes with rituals and rites of passage that filled me with a sense of overwhelming joy and wonder. I was old enough to run around in the dark dressed in some magical way. The neighborhood  looked different and I felt full of wonder. 

Compare that to what I experienced within my religion. My grandmother made sure that I knew that everything was silly...rabbis were stupid people who made stupid rules for other stupid people. There was no point to any of the rituals or prayers or rites of passage. I asked for a Bat Mitzvah and was told I would have sweet 16. I wanted to learn Hebrew and was told to learn Yiddish, but of course was not taught. I was taken to a few services so that I would not feel strange in temple, but at some point that stopped too. And of course no one told me what was going on in the service, and there was usually a lecture on how silly it all was later.
 Holy days were not holy. They were opportunities for lectures that I tried to hide from. I found ways to crawl inside my head and shut out the loud voices around me. I knew there was more to these days, but I had no way to find it. Even though I longed for something deeper. Even though the voices called me, enticing and inviting me to touch a connection to G-d. But I did not have the language to understand the message.

And so I was left with Halloween and witches and tarot cards and astrology and a belief in magic. I was left to search for an experience of G-d somewhere other than in my faith. Halloween worked. Pagan rituals in the moonlight worked....for a while. 

Maybe that is why so many children and adults have fallen in love with the night. We all need a sense of wonder in our lives, a time to feel profoundly alive. What better way than to try on a new identity in the dark of night. To feel free from the restrictions of real life. To touch the unknown and to survive. 

So this journey is more than just a fun wedding, more than a journey with a dress. It is spiritual journey. A journey to dig deep and find more meaning, and to sink deeply into my own religion same way that I used to sink into Halloween. Prayers that have meaning, rituals that embrace me, rites of passage that change me. Like a chuppa or a mikvah, or a tallit, or a year of Jewish holy days. I still do love Halloween, but really, the year of Jewish holy days beats out this one fun holiday.