Everyone around you is starting to go nuts for Halloween. We have a place for those folks. But sometimes in our excitement, we tend to overlook the true meaning of Halloween.
I think Randall Munroe of xkcd has nailed it. Halloween as we know it today has a long lineage, from an obscure pagan calendar date to being appropriated by the Christian church for a tangental idea involving death to an excuse to watch scary movies and throw parties. Oh yeah, and eat plenty of candy.
This idea was illustrated well in the Peanuts special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The character Linus has faith that the Great Pumpkin will appear in the pumpkin patch, obviously mixing up the customs of Halloween with Christmas. That's the joke, although the feeling viewers are left with is sympathy for his steadfast child's mistaken faith. Still, people have been overthinking the metaphor of the Great Pumpkin for decades.
The "true meaning" of any holiday is a ripe subject for overthinking. Charles Dickens' book A Christmas Carol uses the phrase, as so many other stories that came after. But they overlook the subjective nature of any holiday. Is Christmas a celebration of Jesus' birth? Or a celebration of the return of the sun after the winter solstice, signifying hope for the future? Or a way to make one's business profitable before the end of the year? Or is it just a party held when it's too cold to work? In pop culture, the "true meaning" of Christmas always comes down to love and charity, in order to offend the fewest people.
Once you translate that trope to any other holiday, you can see how absurd it is. Halloween is already our most absurd holiday, but it's still a lot of fun. It can be used to say anything.
-via Metafilter
(Images credit: xkcd)