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Halloween—the Festival

Festival is an event that is typically celebrated by some groups of people or communities centralized on some characteristic aspects of particular individuals belonging to various cultures and religions. It is usually marked as national, local or international holiday, Mela or Eid. Other than the culture and religion, the basis of festival is agriculture; there are many festivals associated with the ripening and harvesting of crops or food items. Religious recognition and thanksgiving for fruitful harvests are celebrated as blended events in autumn such as Easter in the Southern Hemisphere and Halloween in the Northern Hemisphere.

The event that I chose is Halloween that is celebrated worldwide on October 31st each year. This festival is embraced by youngsters and individuals belonging to all the age groups and genders. Halloween is based on the concepts of horror, dread, monstrosity and fright. Halloween costumes are traditionally acquired after various supernatural entities such as monsters, vampires, ghosts, skeletons, devils, witches and decayed skeletons. However, now-a-days this trend has shifted to horror casted celebrities, fiction and generic archetypes such as Disney princess and Ninjas. They dress up in costumes and masks aimed at guising themselves and wearing false face similar to the trick- or- treating trend.

Upon exploring the origin of Halloween, I realized that there is no agreed or widely accepted historical approaches that define this ground- breaking festival. However, after deliberate analysis I found a famous Historian Nicholas Rogers who explained the origin of Halloween in the Roman feast called Parentalia of Pomona—the Goddess of Fruits and Seeds and dead or decayed— where people celebrated the festival to please their goddess through darkening their faces and appearing frightening. Today’s Halloween is the most European form of Parentalia (Jack, 1990).

This festival is immensely embraced by thousands of people worldwide. Many people wear associated costumes, eat candies, meat- free foods and play various games on trick- or- treat. However, I personally find it strange sometimes because we have to alter our faces and made them ugly, appalling and deformed; similar to those who are decayed and putrescent. Why do we do so; just because we want to follow the trend? Or probably, just because our peers and friends attempt to do so; and we are reluctant to be banished through showing disapproval for it. It is strange because I do not want myself to look ugly or do anything that goes against the creation of a Creator.

Apparently, this festival has no constructive or positive outcomes; nothing productive or fruitful is added to the society after celebrating this; no source of happiness is there other than watching ours and others’ grotesquely accommodated figures. In my view, this festival should not be continued because it has no logical grounds or welfare or constructive outcomes for society rather it is a just mere gathering involving spending a considerable amount of money for buying costumes and masks and cause trouble for the ones who cannot afford such practices. A super- colossal amount of money being spent on this festival can be and must be used for pro-social purposes so that we could give something productive to the underserved and underprivileged ones.

In a nutshell, I shared my personal opinions regarding Halloween that may be found contradictory for many others but there is no specific reason behind disapproving this festival other than the mere wastage of money and ruining our identities. Apparently, for some individuals, this festival is highly enjoyable because they see themselves exceptionally transformed but there is an equal opportunity that other side of the picture could be more jaundiced for some—it is all about personal preferences.

Works Cited

Jack, S. (1990). The Hallowed Eve: Dimensions of Culture in a Calendar Festival of Northern Ireland. University Press of Kentucky, 95.