The Nightmare Before Halloween

Halloween has not only become a big business but apparently part of the American "tradition," to read this article on a Connecticut school district that has decided to ban all Halloween activities this year. Parents are pushing back, demanding that the unofficial holiday remain in place, feeling strongly that it is a vital part of American life. The school district has chosen to opt for a fall harvest theme instead, which is amusing since this is historically what Halloween celebrated.

Over the years, Halloween has come to be the second biggest "cash cow," or should I say pumpkin, behind Christmas. We're talking billions each year, on everything from pumpkins to costumes to make-up to all those candied treats. It has become indelibly ingrained in our consciousness with such television and film movies as It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown to The Nightmare Before Christmas, not to mention all the Halloween horror stories that are meant to scare us out of our seats. Stores feed off this holiday, seguing into the Christmas season.

There was also anxiety expressed that there wouldn't be enough canned pump filling to go around this year. It seems few persons know how to bake a pumpkin pie from scratch. Something I learned in Lithuania, as there is no canned pumpkin filling.

The sky is the limit when it comes to some of these costumes. Others really make you wonder. Parties become ever more elaborate, as do parades. Key West, Florida, has turned it into a Fantasy Fest. Many towns celebrate Halloween to one extent or another, as did Milford, Connecticut, with a Halloween Parade before the school district decided to ban it. Of course, this doesn't mean kids can't go out trick-or-treating, just not on school time.

The Milford School District felt the holiday puts too much stress on kids, competing with other traditions, particularly among Catholics who see this time not as one of reverie but of revering the dead on All Saints and All Souls Days. Halloween, or Samhain, used to be part of this celebration at the end of the ancient Celtic calendar, but was cut because of its overtly pagan symbolism when Ireland became Catholic. These days, the holiday is mostly commercial-oriented with costumes more and more representing pop culture than traditional Halloween characters.

I remember reading Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide, in which he got very upset when the parents of the small South Carolina coastal town he taught at refused to let him celebrate Halloween with the kids. This was not part of the local tradition and the "nasty headmaster" put her foot down, sending a young Pat Conroy into a temper tantrum, marring what was otherwise a good book.

Halloween isn't for everyone. It's original meaning has been lost over time. Best to celebrate it with family and friends. However, I imagine we will see Fox News jump all over this story as they have the demise of Christmas, condemning our "politically correct" society. Whoops, here is Bill and friends "debating" a similar school ban back in 2012. The horror of it all!

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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