VCF Halloween: When the Ordinary World Turns Thin
Halloween is not only a night for costumes and candy. It is a yearly reminder that the ordinary world has always had cracks in it.
That is my opinion, plain and simple.
A porch light. A candle. A carved pumpkin. A cold road after sunset. These are small things. Common things. Yet on Halloween, they begin to shine in a strange way. The familiar turns watchful. The house creaks with more meaning. The wind sounds like it knows your name.
I grew up in Spain, where the dead were remembered with flowers, candles, chestnuts, and family visits to the cemetery. Now I live in Colorado, where October brings gold cottonwoods, dark mountains, early snow, and rivers with names like Purgatory. Between those two worlds, Halloween makes sense to me.
It is a night for finding the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Origins
Before Halloween had plastic masks, candy bars, and motion-sensor witches that scream from the garden, there was Samhain.
Samhain was an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the beginning of the darker half of the year. It is often called the Celtic New Year, not because every person across every Celtic land kept time in one exact way, but because it stood at a turning point. The fields had been cut. The animals had been brought in. The light was leaving.
And in that change, people sensed danger and wonder.
The old belief said the veil between the living and the dead grew thin at Samhain. Spirits could cross. Ancestors might return. Other beings, less friendly, might wander close to the homes of the living.
So people lit bonfires.
That detail matters. Fire was not decoration. Fire was protection, gathering, memory. A bonfire on a dark hill says, “We are here. We are together. We will not be swallowed by the night.”
Costumes had a purpose too. People disguised themselves to confuse spirits or to move safely among them. I like that idea. A mask was not just play. It was a shield. It said, “If the other world is walking tonight, perhaps I should not look too much like myself.”
That is where Halloween begins for me, not as a childish holiday, but as a serious and joyful answer to a hard truth. Darkness comes. Winter comes. The dead are still part of the village. So we light a fire, put on a face, and step outside.
History
Later came the Church, and with it a new layer of meaning.
Christianity did not simply erase old customs. It often met them, argued with them, renamed them, and absorbed parts of them. Across centuries, the Church established All Saints Day on November 1, a day to honor all saints, known and unknown. Then came All Souls Day on November 2, a day of prayer for the faithful departed.
The evening before All Saints Day became All Hallows’ Eve. Say it long enough, in enough mouths, across enough years, and you get Halloween.
This history is not a clean replacement story. It is more like a village road that many feet have walked. Pagan memory. Christian prayer. Local custom. Family grief. Children’s games. All of it packed down into the same path.
That is why Halloween still feels mixed. It has laughter and mourning. Fear and sweetness. A skeleton on the lawn and a candle at the grave. Some people want to separate those things. I do not. I think the mixture is the point.
Human beings have always needed ways to live near death without being crushed by it.
Halloween gives us a strange tool for that. It lets us name fear, dress it up, knock on doors, and come home with something sweet.
Evolution
When Irish and Scottish immigrants came to America, they brought old customs with them. Those customs found new soil and changed.
In the old lands, people carved turnips or other root vegetables into lanterns. If you have ever seen a carved turnip, you know it can look far more frightening than a pumpkin. Small, pale, twisted, like a face dug out of the earth.
In America, pumpkins were larger, softer, brighter, and easier to carve. So the jack-o’-lantern changed shape. The old idea stayed, but the object became American.
Something similar happened with food.
In parts of Britain and Ireland, people practiced souling, going door to door and receiving small cakes, often in exchange for prayers for the dead. Over time, that old exchange moved toward the modern trick-or-treat. The prayer became a rhyme. The soul cake became candy. The door stayed the same.
That is the part I love.
The door stayed the same.
Halloween still depends on thresholds. House to street. Light to dark. Stranger to neighbor. Living to dead. Ordinary to extraordinary.
A child in a ghost sheet standing on a suburban porch is not so far from an older figure walking a village lane, asking for a cake and offering a prayer. The costume is cheaper now. The candy is wrapped. The porch has a video doorbell. Still, the old shape remains.
Legends and tales
Every Halloween needs a story told low, preferably near a fire.
Here are three.
The first is the vanishing hitchhiker. You know this one, or at least your bones do. A driver sees a person standing alone by the road at night. A young woman, often, though not always. She is cold. She asks for a ride. The driver takes her in, maybe lends her a coat. She gives an address.
When they arrive, she is gone.
The driver knocks at the door. An older person answers. The story comes out slowly. The young woman died years ago on that same road. Sometimes the borrowed coat is found on her grave the next morning.
I do not care how many versions exist. The story still works because every lonely road already feels haunted. The tale only says out loud what the headlights whisper.
The second story is La Llorona, known across Mexico and the American Southwest in many forms. The Weeping Woman wanders near water, crying for her lost children. Parents have used her name to warn children away from rivers and ditches after dark. But she is more than a warning. She is grief with feet. She is the sound of sorrow that cannot find a home.
If you hear her, the old stories say, do not follow.
The third is a Colorado kind of tale. Picture an old mining road after the first snow. The aspens are bare. The sky has gone iron gray. A traveler sees a lantern ahead, bobbing between the trees. They follow it, thinking someone must know the way down.
The lantern keeps its distance.
At last, it stops beside a collapsed shaft. There is no person holding it. Only the light, swaying in air, as if someone below still wants to be found.
Believe it or not. That is your business. Mine is only to say that mountains remember.
Haunted houses
I think haunted houses scare us because they use the safest place we know.
A house is supposed to protect us. Walls, roof, kitchen, bedroom, hallway. These are ordinary things. The haunted house turns each one slightly wrong.
A stair creaks when no one is walking. A bedroom door is open though you closed it. The basement smells damp and old. The attic feels crowded even when it is empty.
That is better than any monster jumping from a closet.
The best haunted houses understand restraint. They do not need constant noise. They know a chair moved six inches can be worse than blood on the wall. They know silence can lean toward you.
This is why we keep returning to them, in stories, movies, roadside attractions, and real old homes with bad plumbing and long memories. We want fear, but we want it framed. We want to step inside the darkness and come back out laughing.
A haunted house lets us practice being brave.
Monsters
Every culture keeps monsters close.
Vampires fear the sun and hunger for life. Werewolves remind us that the wild is not only outside the village. Witches, in old stories, often carry the fear of hidden knowledge, especially knowledge held by those pushed to the edge of society. Zombies are bodies without rest, appetite without soul. Ghosts are memory that refuses to lie down.
Spain has its own shadows.
One of them is el Coco, or el Cuco, depending on the region. This is the monster parents once used to warn children into bed. El Coco has no single fixed shape, which makes it worse. A monster with a clear face can be drawn. A monster without one can become anything in the corner.
When I was a child, el Coco was not a costume. It was a possibility.
That is how monsters work best. They live at the edge of what adults explain. Under the bed. Beyond the trees. In the abandoned house. Near the river after sunset.
We pretend monsters are inventions, but often they are containers. We pour into them our fears of hunger, strangers, sickness, violence, loneliness, and death. Then, on Halloween, we put them on the lawn and give them orange lights.
There is wisdom in that.
Halloween and Spain
In Spain, Halloween still feels new in many places. Children dress up now. Shops sell decorations. Parties happen. Pumpkins appear in windows where they did not appear much when I was young.
Some people complain that Halloween is imported. They are not entirely wrong. The American version, with trick-or-treating and big decorations, arrived through movies, television, schools, and stores.
But Spain was never empty of autumn rituals.
Todos los Santos, All Saints Day, has long been a day for visiting cemeteries, cleaning graves, bringing flowers, and remembering family. In Catalonia, the Castanyada brings roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, panellets, and the feeling of gathering as the year turns cold.
These traditions are quieter than Halloween, but not weaker.
They know something Halloween also knows. The dead are not gone in the simple way we pretend during the busy parts of the year. They remain in names, recipes, gestures, photographs, songs, and the way a person sets a table.
So I do not see Halloween and Spanish traditions as enemies. I see them as cousins who dress differently.
One comes laughing in a skeleton mask. The other arrives with flowers and chestnuts. Both ask us to remember.
Halloween and Colorado
Colorado gives Halloween a hard, beautiful edge.
The air dries out. The mountains darken early. Cottonwoods drop yellow leaves along creeks and rivers. Old towns sit under wide skies. You do not have to work hard to imagine ghosts here. The land already speaks in echoes.
And then there is the Purgatory River.
The name alone carries weight. Purgatory is a place between, in Catholic imagination. Not heaven. Not hell. A place of waiting, cleansing, prayer, and hope. On All Souls Day, people prayed for souls in that in-between state. They prayed because love did not stop at death.
Standing near a river with that name, especially near Halloween, I think of Diego’s diary. I think of a traveler writing by poor light, listening to water move through the dark. I think of names carried across borders, prayers carried across centuries, and the old human wish that no soul be forgotten.
A river is ordinary. Water over stones. Cottonwoods on the bank. Mud on your boots.
But call it Purgatory, and suddenly it becomes a question.
Who passed here? Who suffered here? Who prayed here? Who is still waiting to be remembered?
That is the heart of this VCF Halloween reflection for me. The extraordinary is not somewhere far away. It is folded into the road, the river, the porch, the kitchen, the cemetery gate.
The ordinary world is thinner than we think
Here is where I take my stand.
Halloween matters because it teaches us to look again.
The ordinary world is not dull. We are the ones who grow dull when we stop paying attention. A pumpkin is food, yes, but also a lantern. A costume is play, yes, but also an old disguise against the unknown. A doorbell is a doorbell, until it rings after dark. A river is water, until its name reminds you of souls.
This does not mean we must believe every ghost story. It means we should respect why people tell them.
Ghost stories keep memory alive. Monsters give fear a shape. Candles make grief visible. Costumes let children laugh at the dark. Cemeteries remind us that love needs rituals. Bonfires gather the living while winter approaches.
That is not silly. That is human....
Tonight, light a candle. Tell a story. Remember, the ordinary world is thinner than we think.
ADELANTE.....
KKO ARTESEROS:::...
Comments