I would have never thought my best friend would summon the devil himself at an anti-Halloween “harvest party,” but then again, I didn’t ever think I’d be a Halloween denier. But here we were, two elementary school boys beating a makeshift drum and chanting for Satan in my bedroom with a Christian fundamentalist rager happening downstairs.
Let me back up and set the scene.
My parents actively worried about Satan-worshippers, which
was a thing in the 1980s. The stories about secret seances and animal guttings seemed
endless, and the evangelical crowd ate them up. They speculated about
celebrities and other public figures, as well as people around town, especially
those who seemed “off.” Like many Christian fundamentalist parents, mine were
convinced that a cabal of devil-worshipping degenerates had infiltrated all
levels of society and was on a mission to personally see to the eternal
damnation of every child in America. My parents worried about who was teaching
kids in school, and about the fictional Satan-worshipping students roaming the
hallways between classes, looking for innocent peers to corrupt. Never mind
that Satan worship wasn’t the biggest problem in the Reagan-era world: there
was the cold war with the USSR, massive inflation, and a crack epidemic, but
for some reason, the main concern for 80s parents seemed to be whether there
were devil worshippers in their community.
As the minister of a church, my parents entertained a lot. On
evenings my parents had dinner guests over, I would overhear the adults, who
had retired to the living room after the meal. They talked late into the
evening, telling stories of old buildings being broken into and vandalized with
occult symbols, black sabbaths and orgies being held in cemeteries, or reports
of gutted livestock being found in bizarre places, strung up in grotesque
displays by members of Beelzebub’s fan club. All of this was incredibly
intriguing, so I would eavesdrop as a sort of bedtime story, like my own
personal R.L. Stine audiobook. Unfortunately, my snooping session would invariably
be cut short by one of my parents who noticed me staring from behind a piece of
furniture at the group of adults in rapt attention, their hushed voices no
match for my curiosity and sharp young ears.
“Go to bed, Gary. This isn’t a suitable topic for children,”
my dad would say. My mom would nod her head in agreement. Their response to my
interest was always to send me to bed, so they and their friends could continue
to regale each other with the wicked deeds of the damned. Being told something
was off-limits only made me more obsessed. I would start to argue that I wasn’t
tired but usually stopped myself. I knew better than to push it unless I wanted
to take an ass-whooping and cry myself to sleep.
As it turns out, the aftereffect of those secretive conversations
between my parents and their friends would have a lasting impact on me and my
entire family. I didn’t know it then, but my childhood was about to get a lot
weirder.
What made holidays special for me was the candy, mostly
because having candy was such a rare occurrence. My parents always made sure to
limit our sugar and artificial colors, especially mine, because I was already
hyperactive. They also believed sugar and artificial colors (especially red
food coloring) were also the reason I wet the bed regularly, which was a source
of nearly constant embarrassment and worry for me as a kid. Any time I slept
anywhere away from home, I would do my best not to drink anything or to fall
asleep, for fear that my bladder would betray me. It sometimes worked.
Regular holidays are fun, but candy holidays were the best.
Christmas, Valentine’s, Easter, and especially Halloween. Halloween was the
most exciting. Not just because there is more candy on Halloween than on all
the other holidays, but because it was magical and exciting in a way the others
weren’t. Of course it’s spooky, but it also offers mystery, treasure, and the
opportunity to be anything you want. That’s an irresistible combination for anyone,
especially a six-year-old.
Every year, my older sister, little brother and I would
dress up and collect candy, admiring wild costumes and spookily decorated houses.
We loved it when people went all-out for Halloween. Some of the teenagers in
our town would ride around in the back of a pickup truck, dressed as various
scary creatures, yelling and brandishing fake weapons. One guy dressed in a
plaid shirt revved a chainsaw (that upon my dad’s further inspection turned out
to be disabled) as the truck approached. They laughed as the younger kids
(including us) screamed. I loved it though.
Upon returning home, we combed over the loot in our pails.
We picked out duds like circus peanuts, and dental hazards like hard taffy, then
ditched the candy apples to avoid eating glass or razor blades. Then we swapped
with each other for our favorites. We were only allowed to keep about 30 pieces
of candy for fear we might get cavities. So, after we had optimized our
stashes, we handed over what was left to our parents, who probably ate it
themselves. Their reasoning was rooted in dental health, but it felt like a
taste of what it’s like to pay taxes.
My mom and dad would often point out people in town who had
bad teeth. “Looks like someone had too much candy,” my dad would say, gesturing
to some random person. It always seemed to be either a skinny 30-something guy
with tobacco-stained teeth or a disheveled-looking middle-aged woman with
worn-down black stubs sitting on top of angry pink and red gums. Once,
observing a skinny strung-out-looking white guy with a meth mouth walking out
of a gas station with a soda, my dad shook his head, “That’s why we don’t eat
sugar very often.” That, plus it seemed like everything with sugar also had red
food coloring in it. Piss city.
But for a moment, on Halloween and a few days that followed,
we had a reprieve from the commentary and speculation over the oral hygiene of
strangers.
Once Halloween was over and our 30 pieces of candy had run
out, it was time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. Pies, sweet potatoes,
and homemade cranberry sauce (my favorite). See you next year, Halloween! Or so
I thought. The following year, when I was seven, my family stopped celebrating
Halloween.
It was mid-October, and as the rest of the world was getting
ready for another candy-filled holiday, our parents sat us down at the table. Their
faces were somber as they broke the news that there would be no Halloween this
year. Or any other year, for that matter.
I immediately assumed it was because we had done something
wrong. I could see Heather and Daniel thinking the same thing. Heather was
furious, and Daniel and I were stunned.
“Why can’t we go
trick-or-treating anymore?” she asked somewhat defiantly, ever the one to challenge
my parents, which they hated. “Is it because of candy apples with razor blades?
Because we always throw them away.”
My dad was ready. Clearly, he and Mom had thought through
how this conversation would go.
“Halloween is based on a pagan holiday of human sacrifice,” Dad
launched into his dissertation. “People celebrating would burn their kids alive
as an act of worship to a false god. Usually around the same age as you are.” He
looked pointedly at me, as if to say, “would you rather skip Halloween or be
sacrificed?”
Burned alive? My eyes were as wide as they could get, ready
to jump out of my head at the slightest noise. I was both terrified and
intrigued. A few months before, I had seen a renaissance depiction of the ancient
Roman god Saturn devouring his own son in the pages of one of my dad’s books.
That was the false god that came to mind, so I asked my dad if that was what he
was talking about. I wasn’t far off as it turns out that Saturn is thought of
as Greek mythology’s depiction of Satan. “Something like that,” my dad said.
“Except they didn’t eat the children after they sacrificed them, or at least
the scholars don’t think that they did. The thing is, not only is Halloween
based on that holiday, but people like to dress up and scare each other with
gory costumes and stories about murder. When people celebrate blood and gore on
Halloween, they are really celebrating the devil. But we know better now.”
The very next Sunday, my father delivered a sermon detailing
the history of Halloween, condemning it as a Satanic high holiday to celebrate
the ancient Canaanite god Moloch. He explained the process in which Moloch’s
followers would sacrifice their own children, lining them up one after the
other as they were fed into a furnace in the belly of a huge bronze sculpture
of the bull-headed god, whose hands were outstretched as if beckoning the
children. The high priest would beat a drum during the ceremony, less for
religious theater than to cover the screams of the children being burned alive,
lest the parents overhear and change their minds about letting the children be
consumed by the hungry horned god.
“You shall not give any of your children to devote them by
fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God.” My dad banged his fist on
the pulpit for emphasis before letting a pregnant silence hang in the air
before the citation. “Leviticus 18:21.”
My dad didn’t stop there, he drew parallels to Samhain, the Gaelic
festival of harvest that predates Halloween, and traced the lineage of the Jack-O-Lantern
directly to the human sacrifice previously described. According to him, they
were one and the same.
My curiosity got the best of me, and I had to look around to
see people’s reactions. The faces in the pews were frozen. My dad is a very
enthusiastic storyteller, and he delivered his lesson with passion and
conviction. Anyone who had thought they’d come to Sunday service to sing a few
songs and say a few prayers, then beat the Baptists to lunch, had gotten more
than they bargained for. I must admit, I was oddly entertained in the most
morbid of ways.
My dad announced that the entire was invited church to a
“Harvest Party” at our house that Friday evening, which happened to be on the
same night as Halloween. There would be no creatures of darkness, no blood and
gore, and no slutty outfits, but Christian-friendly costumes like pilgrims and policemen
were welcomed. So basically, it was Samhain but for Jesus.
That week, my siblings and I made a piñata out of old
newspapers (as a homeschool art project, of course) and filled it with candy.
As a busy 1980s homeschooler parent of three kids, my mom was always coming up
with creative ways to pretend we were getting a real education. “It’ll be your
art class,” my mom said. “What public school kids get to make a piñata in
class?” Without a frame of reference, I imagined a boring classroom full of
dusty old books, the teacher reading a romance novel at her desk as the light
of knowledge went out in the eyes of the students. Their dumb eyes glazed over
as their IQs plummeted and they began to drool on themselves like babies.
“Yeah, they’re missing out,” I agreed wholeheartedly, having
convinced myself that public schools were a vacuum for creativity.
Once completed, we hung the piñata in the garage, which we
had decorated with streamers and balloons. A ping-pong table was set up on one
end of the garage, and a table for refreshments. Mom threw sheets and
tablecloths over the pile of unpacked boxes sitting in the corner, left over
from our move last year.
The harvest party was a smash hit, including the devotional
and sing-along that kicked it off. We sang all the usual youth devotional songs
with titles like, “A Common Love,” and “As the Deer Panteth for the Water.”
Toward the end of the party, some of the adults decided to have an encore sing-along,
filling the garage with mostly-on-key Acappella music. The harvest party was a
smash hit, which undoubtedly made my parents very happy with their decision to
cancel Halloween. Nobody had to sacrifice their children to Moloch, and all the
kids got candy. Everybody was a winner.
Nathan, my best friend from church, had been particularly
taken with my dad’s sermon, especially the gory details of human sacrifice and
satanic rituals.
As soon as he arrived at the party, my dad’s sermon was all
he could talk about. He may have missed the part where my dad said that
Halloween shouldn’t be celebrated, but he retained the minutiae of human
sacrifice like a museum docent.
“Hey Gary, what if that piñata was filled with children?” He
mused. “And we were accidentally sacrificing them to Moloch when we hit it with
the bat.”
I laughed. Nathan was hilarious. But then I imagined God
seeing me laugh, disappointment painted over His face, which according to the
Bible, mortals can’t actually see, but I imagined it anyway.
“I hope we wouldn’t go to hell for it because it was an
accident,” I said loudly because God hears literally everything, including
farts. As soon as I said it, I realized how silly that was, since God sees
everything and would know we didn’t know about the children being sacrificed in
the piñata. It’s a lot to keep up with that stuff sometimes.
Nathan was over it and was now across the room looking at
the boxes covered in sheets. I quickly said a silent prayer to ask God’s
forgiveness for doubting his omniscience before following Nathan to tell him
about the unopened boxes full of this and that.
At some point, Nathan and I were hanging out in the bedroom
that my brother and I shared, discussing Moloch and human sacrifice (like you
do when you’re 7 years old).
“I wonder if they put the children in one at a time, or if
they just stack them all in there together and start the fire,” Nathan mused.
“Yeah,” I also pondered, “If they do it one at a time, do
you think the next kid would hear the one being burned alive and try to escape?
Maybe they keep the kids somewhere else, though.”
“No, they don’t hear, remember the priest is beating a drum
really loud to cover up the screaming,” he said, looking around the room. He was
always entertained by random things, making funny comments, or using them as
props for a goofy bit.
“Oh yeah,” I replied. I had completely forgotten the
mechanics of human sacrifice, but Nathan had apparently taken notes. Impressed
at the cleverness of the Moloch priest and my friend’s apparently photographic
memory, I mused, “That’s pretty smart of them.”
In the bedroom I shared with my brother, there was a short,
oval-shaped metal trash can with a hyper-realistic prehistoric vignette on the
sides. On one side was a T-rex, jaws open wide, obviously preparing to kill and
eat the triceratops on the opposite side of the trash can, whose mouth-beak
open, bellowing defiantly. Nathan picked up the trash can and turned it over
and thumped the bottom of the trash-can-turned-tribal-drum rhythmically,
impersonating Moloch’s high priest, who was actually Satan’s high priest.
“Doe mi doe, doe mi so, praising our lord Satan,” he sang melodically,
repeating the invocation to Lucifer several times, growing louder and louder. A
deep belly laugh that bubbled up and almost made me hyperventilate. When I
think something is funny, it’s like my whole body is possessed.
As funny as it was, I was also worried my dad would come
upstairs and see my good friend worshipping the devil, with me laughing at him.
I imagined his stupid Moloch priest song accidentally opening a vortex to hell,
and our souls being sucked straight down to the fiery underworld. Dad would
have been so pissed that somehow hell would have seemed like a better place to
be than in the room with him.
Luckily, my dad didn’t bust our newly formed occultist coven.
There was a possibility my little brother had been spying on us, which meant
that he may snitch on me to my parents later. He tended to keep a tally sheet
of his siblings’ tattle-worthy deeds and drop a bomb to get out of a spanking
for something he did. I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t dime on me later, but for
now, I was safe.
Before you draw any conclusions about me, you should know
that I internalized my dad’s teachings. I wasn’t a rebel or a troublemaker, I just
had a sense of humor that got me in trouble sometimes. After learning about the
history of Halloween, alarm bells would go off in my head when other kids would
mention their Halloween plans. When asked about mine, I would calmly explain
the origins of Halloween and introduce them to the millennia-old concept of
ritualistic child sacrifice. Let’s just say it didn’t make me popular. But
every night when I got under the covers, I knew that even if tonight was one of
those nights where I wet the bed, at least I’d go to heaven if I died in my
sleep.
I went to a few homeschooling group “harvest parties” during
my teenage years, which were awkward affairs with the usual junk food that
boomer parents always associated with teenagers -- pizza, soda, and Oreos. We
didn’t eat processed food at our house, so the most exciting thing about
homeschool or church functions was the opportunity to feel normal by eating
what normal people ate. When you eat things like cream of wheat topped with a
tiny bit of raw honey for breakfast, a PB&J made with natural peanut butter
on my mom’s stone-ground whole wheat bread for lunch, and squeaky steamed green
beans with rice and seared tofu steaks for dinner, things like cheese puffs and
Fanta are a luxury. Our parents would drop us off, since the parties were
chaperoned by other homeschool parents, and go do whatever it was they wanted
to. The harvest parties were never fun because we didn’t really know anyone
there. Homeschool support groups are less about the kids than you would think.
Mostly, they are loose groups of families whose parents meet once a month or so
and swap ideas about how to educate (or for some, isolate, brainwash and infantilize)
their children.
I’m not sure why my parents thought bringing their shy,
sheltered children to a random unstructured event full of random people we
rarely saw would help us thrive socially. We would mostly sit by ourselves, drowning
our bummed-out awkwardness in processed carbs as we watched people who already
knew each other have a good time. For the time being, Halloween and its
variants were over for Heather, Daniel, and me.
I would be fully grown and living on my own before
celebrating Halloween again. As an adult, it was more about going to a show and
then a cool party than it was about candy and spookiness. Still fun, but
different. One such party was called “Crunk-O-Ween” where I would see the most hilarious
Jack-O-Lantern, which had a dick and balls carved into it instead of a face. I
remember thinking that was the funniest thing I had ever seen and talked about
it all night long.
But even while laughing about the pornographic
Jack-O-Lantern that night with my friends, I remembered the origins of Halloween.
I knew at that moment, mid-laugh, that I’ll never be able to look at a
Jack-O-Lantern without wondering if the parents loaded all the kids into
Moloch’s belly at once or if they did it one by one, beating a drum so the
parents’ hearts wouldn’t be softened by their children’s dying screams.
