With Australia’s upside down holidays, it’s hard to find joy in some but Halloween is a treat

While some view Halloween as an unwelcome North American tradition, I for one love it and all this kooky pagan tradition brings us, writes Danielle Wood.

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WHEN you live in the Southern Hemisphere, the year’s major festivals can seem a little bit unhinged.

Easter, with its messages of springtime, rebirth and new life, comes just as we begin the plunge into winter.

Christmas, with its wintry iconography of crackling fires and blanketing snow, comes while we’re sunning ourselves at the beach in midsummer.

If you’re not Christian, as we are not in our family, then it can be even harder to invest these celebrations with meaning.

Of course, you can just make the most of them in their secular forms, and focus on enjoying the presents, the family time and the public holidays.

Or, you can have a go at repurposing them in ways that are specifically meaningful to you and yours.

Halloween, which is upon us next week, is another topsy-turvy festival. It happens for us in spring, even though its golden-orange imagery of bonfires and harvest-time is vividly autumnal.

I know a lot of people dismiss Halloween on the basis that it is an unwelcome North American import to our culture. But I love it.

Dig down into the roots of this plucky little festival and you’ll find a complex intertwining of the Christian and the Pagan. Through Halloween’s raggedy costumes, you can still glimpse the Pagan tradition of Samhain (pronounced “sow-win”), which took place at the time of the autumn equinox, and which many historians say was traditionally regarded as a time when the veil between the living and the dead grew thin.

Depending on where you are in the world, and perhaps also on your natural predisposition,

As we carve the pumpkin, paint our faces and don costumes, I’ll remember and give thanks for all those I’ve lost over the years and the gifts they gave me.

Halloween is either a time to face the fear of death head-on while wearing a spooky costume, or a time to honour and feed your ancestors.

Five years ago, on October 31, we received news that my father-in-law – in Western Australia – was dying. While the children and I stayed home and held fast to our plans to celebrate Halloween with friends-who-are-almost-family, my husband was in the air over the Nullarbor Plain, hoping to arrive in Perth in time to say goodbye. He didn’t quite make it.

A few days later, I caught a plane that landed in just enough time for me to pick
up a hire-car, drive east to the wheatbelt town where my parents-in-law had made their lives, and to put on my funeral frock
in the carpark of a white weatherboard country church.

The jacarandas were in bloom, and in his coffin, my father-in-law – Peter – held sprigs of ripe wheat in his hand.

Since we almost always lived a great distance apart, I didn’t spend enormous amounts of time with Peter when he was alive, but I knew him as a good, steady, honourable man.

He went to Lodge meetings and ran the Rotary Club doughnut van, spent nights cutting stamps from envelopes to raise money for immunisation programs in distant countries, creaked when he stood up, and had a boyish chuckle. The jokes he and I shared came from our different perspectives on landscape. Once, when I was in the wheatbelt, he offered to “take me up the mountain” for a picnic lunch.

“What mountain, Peter?” I asked, staring in perplexity around at the achingly dry, unrelentingly flat terrain of his birthplace.

”That one,” he said, solemnly, pointing to the horizon.

“Peter,” I said, “that is not a mountain. That’s not even a hill. It’s maybe, what, an undulation?”

There is much to love about this plucky little festival with its complex intertwining of the Christian and the Pagan, writes Danielle Wood.

But if I laughed at his “undulation” (which I later had to admit did give an impressive view of the district), he chuckled at my complete inability to orient myself using the sun. It never failed to amuse him that I couldn’t find the homestead after being out in one of his wide, wide paddocks.

“How do you stop yourself from getting lost when you’re back home?” he’d ask in perplexity.

“Mountain on one side, water on the other,” I told him. “There’s nothing else you need to know.”

When Peter died, we bought two jacaranda trees. One of them is thriving in my mother-in-law’s wheatbelt garden. The other is a stick clinging grimly to life here in Hobart, reminding us that it is not always easy to live beyond your comfort zone.

Five years already. It doesn’t seem so long ago. But next Saturday, as we carve the pumpkin, paint our faces, don our costumes and mull the wine, I’ll remember and give thanks for all those I’ve lost over the years and the gifts they gave me. Especially Peter, who was one half of the team who gave me my husband. Peter, who on the very night of Halloween, glimpsed that flimsy veil and stepped through.