Halloween takes Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has  hitched its wagon to the Halloween star. For several years the November holiday was better known as the day that Santa Claus came to town and the beginning of Christmas season. People eager for the holiday were Macy’s parade organizers, Army/Navy football fans, turkey farmers, and adults. That’s because Thanksgiving is not for everyone, unlike Christmas and Halloween, the two holidays that sandwich it.

For several years, Thanksgiving has needed a transfusion, something that Halloween is supplying.

I saw it plainly one morning as I drove west on U.S. 460 along the flanks of East River Mountain in Bluefield. The sun wasn’t quite strong enough to burn through the fog that hovered over the mountain and the road. In the dimness, I saw a line of headlights coming toward me in the eastbound lane. Its slow movement and high beams told me I was passing a funeral procession. Someone was taking his or her last ride -- to the cemetery.

That’s sad, I thought, and then I looked up at the mountain that rises from the roadside, reaching up to 4,000 feet. The foliage was brilliant and iridescent with the colors of fall.

The hearse’s color, funereal black, signaled death, but so did the red, orange, yellow, and bronze of the magnificent leaves on the mountain. Bluefield people are decorating their yards with these colors, the colors of Thanksgiving, and the black and orange colors of Halloween -- colors that bridge those between the death of humans and nature.

Halloween celebrates death. Historically, in Great Britain, October 31st was known as All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Hallow’s Day or All Saint’s Day. Even November 2nd was set aside as All Soul’s Day -- that’s three days to honor the dead. Halloween went on to become the important day, a time for trick or treating, dressing in costumes, and making merry mischief. Thanksgiving has a past, too. History books say it was late November 1621 when the Pilgrims came together to give thanks for surviving their first year in America. This celebration also has its roots in death: it comes at the end of harvest, when the northern hemisphere has turned black and brown, signally the end of life and the beginning of the dormant period.

You don’t see people getting excited about Thanksgiving, though, not like they do Halloween. This is apparent in discount stores, where little space is given to turkey centerpieces and turkey-shaped gravy boats. But Halloween costumes, creepy hands in talking bowls, dancing skeletons, black cats and lights, and skulls and crossbones fill several up-front rows. Even though the holiday is two months or more away, Christmas tree displays outnumber Thanksgiving ones.

According to Unity Marketing, a consulting firm in New York City, Halloween accounts for 10 percent of all holiday decoration sales. This year consumers will buy 1.54 billion dollars worth of Halloween decorations, up 5.5 percent from last year. When you factor in candy for trick or treating, the amount goes up a lot more.

What does Halloween have that Thanksgiving lacks? Halloween is for everybody -- kids and adults. It triggers the imagination; people like to be scared. On Saturday night, Crab Orchard Museum in Tazewell County turned its pioneer village into a haunted one. A long line of men and women, children and elderly, waited patiently for a ghoulish escort to take them through the dark cabins hung with bats and spiders and inhabited by otherworldly creatures.

Everyone, even the kids, knew the monsters, spiders, and corpses were make-believe, but it didn’t stop them from screaming. Halloween is good for the psyche -- it allows us to conjure up our nightmares, bring them to light, and scream at them.

Thanksgiving can’t match this. Even the menu is rarely imaginative. We use the word “traditional” when we speak of the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, brown and serve rolls, and pumpkin pie we heap on the dining room table.

Halloween is neighborly; it brings strangers together. And you don’t have to be yourself. You can be a superhero, a clown, a famous person, Frankenstein, an angel, or anything that your imagination envisions. Thanksgiving is not a time for people to be alone either, but most people expect to spend it with friends and relatives. It’s safe and unimaginative.

That’s reflected in the newest holiday decorations. You will find blow-up ghosts, spiders and witches for Halloween, but you won’t find blow-up turkeys. Manufacturers skip right over those and go to the air-filled snowmen and Santas.

But more and more, Thanksgiving decorations are finding their way into the Halloween ones. And both are finding their way out of houses and into yards. On my street, Wintercreek Drive, neighbors have put up displays that rival those of movie sets; they even shine spotlights on them. There are pumpkins perched on bales of hay, dried fodder tied with orange ribbon, and scarecrows wearing floppy hats. Pumpkins spill out of carts onto lawns. Woven among them are balloon witches, ghosts in trees, orange lights around windows and doors, plywood cutouts of black cats, and lighted skulls lining sidewalks.

Come Sunday evening, Halloween-specific decorations will be front and center, but Monday they will come down, leaving the Thanksgiving decorations. No one can say, “What happened to Thanksgiving?” for the holiday will shine until the lighted deer that move their heads up and down and side to side replace the bales of hay stacked with pumpkins.