Ben O’Brien
Managing Editor
SAINTS
Halloween was once observed by pious Catholics as the vigil of All Saints Day, the feast for the remembrance of saints and martyrs. This holy day, however, has been perverted into a pagan bacchanalia, a vile tool of Satan, which corrupts the minds of our youth!
Every year I wait in trepidation for the little children to arrive at my doorstep in their satanic guises, seeking candy but losing their souls. I wait with my exorcism kit close at hand to cast out the demons from the miniature Batmen and Harry Potters.
And to think that even at Notre Dame this devotional feast should be warped into a pageant of strumpets, pimps and murderers! Such a lascivious, salacious, prurient and libidinous display of scantily clad harlots I have never seen.
The true meaning of Halloween is not in merriment and make-believe but awareness of our own impending doom. People who strut about on Halloween engaging in pranks and indulging their depraved appetites are in reality treading precariously over the abyss. The sickle of Death is poised over their necks, ready to fall at any time. This is what Halloween should teach our children: Hell is always just a breath away. Especially when your breath reeks of alcohol.
There is therefore some merit to the blood and guts sometimes displayed in costumes – if it serves as a memento mori to the children, demonstrating the transient nature of this life. Indeed, the children should not dress as fictitious characters but as the martyrs and saints themselves. What could be more edifying than dressing as Thomas More with his decapitated head tucked under your arm, or St. Laurence with singed flesh still burnt to his grill?
Halloween is a valuable opportunity for mortification and asceticism, and we must not taint it with the gluttony of candy-chomping or the lusts of the flesh. Worse, at this, Our Lady’s University, we mock the holy vigil seasons by extending the celebration of this ‘feast’ by days on end, as though it were un-Holy Week or the Twelve Days of [Satan’s] Christmas.
Hence this year at Halloween, instead of steeping your soul in the horrific odors of the nether regions of local houses of ill repute, come to the All Saint’s Vigil Chanted Latin Mass to be held by The Club Whose Members are Holier Than Thou (TCWMAHTT).
SKANKS
Let’s face it, Halloween lost any religious significance a long time ago. You may insist on drudging up anachronistic medieval customs associated with the Christian vigil of All Saints Day, but even the most puritanical Catholic must admit that it is a feast—a celebration. So grab that mullet wig or your patent leather miniskirt and let’s party!
At Halloween we college students try to recapture that imagination and wonder we cherished as kids when we dressed up as a princess or action hero and got to stay out past bedtime on a school night, ransacking the neighborhood in order to amass obscene amounts of candy.
Sadly though, we are grown up now (more or less) and simply breaking out that Power Ranger or Ninja Turtle costume and eating candy until we’re sick just doesn’t do it for us any more. As true adults, we have to sleaze things up with a bit. In our “trick-or-treating,” instead of candy, the treat we crave is booze, and the tricks ... ya get my drift.
Halloween is about taking some character that evokes the innocence and nostalgia of childhood and souping it up with some good old school college humor, people. Pocahontas becomes sexy Pocahontas. Elmo becomes crack-head Elmo. Or if you’re really feeling creative, just exploit a cultural stereotype! The “trailer trash” couple can never fail to terrify. The dirtier the better if you know what I mean. See, it’s not really your beautifully gaping cleavage that you’re showing off to the whole world, it’s just the character you’re dressed as, so don’t worry about it!
Costumes, however, are by no means limited to our childhood heroes with a kinky twist. As sophisticated college scholars we seize the opportunity of Halloween to impart our peers with incisive social commentary. With our costumes we can satirize important topical issues and national figures. For instance, at a Halloween party last year I encountered a pregnant, cigarette-smoking, drunken Britney Spears—a sobering sight that seared into my memory.
Anyone who would oppose the deliciously risqué fun that is Halloween at Notre Dame is like that mean old lady on my block when I was a kid who gave out apples and toothbrushes rather than candy to trick-or-treaters. And just as I pelted Mrs. Johnson’s house with those same healthy “treats” so I will rebuff anyone who endeavors to limit my amusement in celebrating the American institution that is this nation’s pimpin’est commercial holiday.
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