Halloween and the McDonald's effect

So that’s another Halloween behind us. 

It always strikes me as a bit of a bizarre celebration. Though, to be fair, the way Christians celebrate most feast days seems pretty bizarre these days. I mean, just think about it.

Easter is supposed to mark the execution and resurrection of Christ, as the redeemer of mankind. I’m not quite sure who feels redeemed these days, given the state of the world. In any case I’m not sure how that has anything to do with chocolate eggs, rabbits or chickens.

If Easter is about the death (the temporary death) of Christ, Christmas is about his birth. You’d think that might be a matter of some reverence and solemnity. Nothing to do with a large laughing fellow in a red suit and a white beard, or with eating and drinking far too much.

So it is with All Saints Day, or All Hallows as it’s sometimes called. 

Many religions go in for ancestor worship. The closest Christianity gets to it is All Hallows, when the idea is to remember those who went before us. In most Catholic countries, many do indeed pop down to the cemetery to do a bit of remembering.

But the night before, the eve of All Hallows or Halloween, which might be the moment to start getting into the mood for the quiet reflection of the day after, has evolved (or possibly declined) into a rather strange pantomime when kids, not all of them all that young, go wandering the streets dressed up to look faintly worrying, and go demanding unhealthy foods from strangers’ houses. What’s more, they do it with the time-honoured phrase ‘trick or treat’, suggesting that a failure to comply with the request could have undesirable consequences. It may just be me, but doesn’t that sound terribly like extortion with threats? 

This curious custom comes to us from the US, and it seems to be working its way into the culture of more and more countries where it was previously foreign. I suppose that’s what come of having the biggest economy in the world and the most powerful armed forces. People tend to follow your lead.

Terrifying Halloween Figures on Cruz’s terrace

To be honest, it can be rather more attractive than the ‘trick or treat’ menace suggests. Cruz, a nearly-neighbour of ours (that’s not to be confused with ‘near neighbour’: this one lives several streets away) in our little district on the outskirts of Valencia in Spain, likes to do up her garden and front terrace for Halloween (she does the same for Christmas, though with different decorations, of course). She then invites anyone who’s so inclined to come in and look around. 

We had our grandkids with us, so visiting her house went down a treat (no trick) with them.

Matilda displaying the appropriate level
of terror before a Halloween horror

It seemed a kind, generous and open-hearted way of marking this strangely alien event. I congratulated her on the initiative. She explained that she did it purely for the fun of it and because the children enjoy it.

Cruz with some of her frightening figures

The funny thing is that the Valencia region – formerly a kingdom in its own right – has its own tradition of faintly frightening figures, and it’s a little sad to see them being swamped by the diminutive ghosts and luminous skeletons of Halloween.

The Kingdom was ruled by Arabs until the 13th century. Then, in 1238, it was ‘liberated’ by King James I of Aragon. The quotation marks around ‘liberated’ are there because it’s not at all clear that there was much of a liberation. It may just have been the replacement of one ruler by another, and the newcomer may have been rather less sophisticated than the one he kicked out.

Indeed, the man who many regard as Spain’s finest poet and playwright of all time, Federico García Lorca, was murdered by followers of General Franco in 1936, his body disposed of in an unmarked grave still not discovered today, for having said that the worst thing that happened to his native Andalusia was to have the Moors kicked out of it. No doubt his cause wasn’t helped by the fact that he was gay, not an inclination likely to win him friends in Franco’s movement, but the comment about the Arabs seems to have been the immediate cause of their being irritated with him. 

Fatally irritated. 

That’s despite his probably being right.

So one of the figures used to frighten kids in the Valencia region is ‘the Moor Mussa’, presented as a former Arab king of ‘Balansiya’ as Valencia was known when it was Moorish, seeking revenge on the dastardly Christians by preying on their children. Only the badly-behaved ones, however.  

The Moor Mussa
I wonder whether the smile makes him
more or less frightening?

This reminds me of the Latin-American friend who told me that in her childhood, adults would try to frighten her with the warning that “el pirate Draque” would come for her if she didn’t mend her ways. I love it that England’s revered sea captain Sir Francis Drake is seen in South America as a bogeyman.

The Butoni might have upset me as a child

The Valencian horde of monsters contains many more characters. There’s the Butoni who comes for kids who leave their meals unfinisehd, cry too much or refuse to sleep (thank God I wasn’t brought up in Valencia: I wouldn’t have lasted a week). 

Quarantamaula: oh wow! A shapechanger
Particularly fiendish

Quarantamaula is still worse, because he’s a shape changer. He’ll take the form of whatever animal the child he’s after finds most frightening. That way he can use the fear he inspires to get the behaviour he (or, I suppose, anyone trying to look after a disobedient kid) requires.

And there’s a whole host of others, as my good friend Ana Cervera, always an invaluable source of information about my adopted city, assures me.

A host of scarekids...
Thanks, Ana, for sending the picture through

The tradition, since the middle ages, is that on the night of 31 October to 1 November, Valencians come together to tell each other horror stories with these creatures as protagonists.

Now, I’m not claiming that they’re particularly wonderful. Or that they aren’t. They seem a tad more frightening than most Halloween figures, but I leave it to you to judge whether that’s a good or a bad thing. As for making a bogeyman of an Arab, does that feel more than a little politically incorrect? But I do like the idea that different regions have different traditions, and it seems a pity that they should be lost in a tedious homogenisation across the world. Especially as there’s nothing specifically appealing about the Halloween celebrations that we all seem to be switching to.

Even if they’re interpreted through the warm heart and kindly intentions of a generous person like our nearly-neighbour Cruz.

Oh well. The US is top dog, at least for now, and preferable to some of the other possible candidates. Xi’s China? Putin’s Russia? Spare us. I’ll put up with Halloween rather than have them dictating my way of life, even at the cost of giving up on the variety of local traditions.

And even if it does mean putting up with the dull conformity of what I think of as the McDonald’s effect…