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Happy Halloween, friend. 🎃
I love Halloween. I love that we all agree to be spooky together. I like that we put out cheap-looking decorations just for the hell of it (currently in my yard: a scarecrow, skulls, a gravestone with a skeleton, and a row of little witches). I like that kids dress up and eat too much candy and I like that adults do, too. I think we could all do with a little more whimsy in our lives and I think Halloween gives us the avenue to indulge in it, just a bit.
But I love the other side of Halloween, too. I like that it’s old—probably not as neatly aligned with Samhain as neopagans would have you believe, but old nonetheless, an archaic recognition of transition: day to night, living to dead, summer to winter. I like that there’s a bite to it, not the spun-candy sweetness of Christmas nor the pastel florals of Easter, but something darker. I like the contrast between the cheap whimsy of our modern Halloween and the old staid rituals of All Hallows’ Day. I like that in our fairly sanitised Western culture, Halloween stands alone, hinting at something more ancient, something with teeth.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the teeth. We are a culture terrified of the dark.* We tell stories of the sweet and the good and try our best to brush anything else away. We tell you to be positive, to manifest, to be pure—but that’s all just refusing to acknowledge that the teeth are there, and always have been. Life is a balance, with equal weight to both sides: day to night, living to dead, summer to winter.
But then here is Halloween, some kind of holdover from a time when that balance was more apparent, when the boundary dividing the light and dark was so much thinner. So we put on our costumes and eat too much sugar and play Monster Mash for the millionth time while outside, the world slips from day to night, from living to dead, from summer to winter.
Happy Halloween, friends. May it be spooky and whimsical, and may you spare just a second to acknowledge the dark. 🕯️
From a recent visit to the ruins in Merrickville.
*And by “we,” I mean the Westernised, Christianised traditions that I come from—I know this isn’t the case for everyone.
Weekly favourites 💌
Last week, I bought a Fujifilm X-T30 after eyeing it for months. It’s a little mirrorless camera that looks like an old school film camera. After getting my first Real Grownup Camera last year—which travelled with me on countless hikes and to Greece, Portugal, and Newfoundland—I was finding that it was really heavy and cumbersome. My Fuji is tiny, which means I have no excuse not to bring it with me everywhere.
I went to the small village of Merrickville on a little solo excursion recently to visit two of my favourite stores: Wick Witch and Pickle & Myrrh. Both are great little stores, both are beautiful in person (Wick Witch has a new location that actually took my breath away), and both spark a part of me that kind of desperately wants to own a cute shop in a small town.
I recently got a bunch of stickers from brookeillust and they are just precious. My inner sticker-obsessed child is so happy with them.
