What a Depressing Hallowversary

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.

Halloween 1997

We grew up with ALL the animated Halloween specials. The radio stations play Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Linus and Lucy" at Christmas time but that's how It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown starts. It will always be Halloween music to my ears. I learned the origin of the word "Halloween" from the 1970s special The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. And who wouldn't want a night rollicking with a slightly crazed witch like in Witch's Night Out? Plus good luck hearing "Werewolves of London" outside of October.

Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.

In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified,  ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).

We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann. 

There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!

The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.

This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.