I have a range of “teaching” T-shirts that have something on them that, for some lectures, aligns with the content. “Dark Judges” for tests, or “20% correct as usual” for lectures about statistics.
I also have a Christmas-themed T-shirt, inspired by Rick and Morty (around which some of my lecture examples are built) that says “Happy Human Holiday”. The downside is I get to wear it, literally, once a year. At Christmas.
Other people also dress up for Christmas, and other holidays – Halloween, for example.
In fact, two-dollar shops have been stocking the Halloween dress-ups for a couple of months now. I wonder who buys their Scary Barmaid or Frightening Accountant two months in advance?
Believe it or not, there is some research on this and, of course, it comes from the United States. There will be a lot of Scary Donald Trumps this year.
Unfortunately, that tells us what we could guess. The folk who buy their costumes, and more importantly, start wearing them in August, really, really like Halloween. Or they’re part of a subcultural group that tends to dress in black with bat wing motifs all year round. Goths, for example.
But Halloween gives people licence to really black out; until then, its fans have to make do with more subtle markers, like jewellery, for example.
Halloween has a variety of roots. As a “celebration”, it is often described as having taken off in the US, after being introduced by Irish immigrants. To sum it up, here are the opening lines of a 1951 Scientific American article: “The eve of November 1 is both a solemn religious occasion and a time of games and pranks. Many of its customs descend from a Druidical holiday that involved burning men in cages.”
While it has associations with non-Christian spiritual traditions, that part has increasingly dropped off as entrepreneurs realised the sales potential. An article in the 1990 issue of Advances in Consumer Research coined Halloween “an evolving American Consumer Ritual”.
How commercial has it become? In the US, spending has topped US$10 billion for the past four years, with the average adult forking out just over $100. I’ve visited Salem (outside Halloween season), where stores spend most of the year stocking up for the Jack-o’-lanterns to come out.
It’s this juxtaposition of tradition and commercialisation that works against Halloween. Consumers in the UK (where the whole thing may have been kicked off by the Celts), describe becoming increasingly ambivalent towards the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. They recognise the tradition and the social aspects of coming together but resent the reverse colonisation of American consumerism.
If you hit the archives to see who gets involved with Halloween, and why, there is an awful lot of pop psychology. Pop psychiatry, in fact. For example, apparently some of us go trick or treating because it allows us to participate in a pseudo-scary experience that’s a safe way of living out our fears. All very Freudian.
But is it bunkum? Our research on horror movie fandom shows a weak but statistically significant correlation between self-reported anxiety and a penchant for horror movies.
Christians have had an up-and-down relationship with Halloween. There’s a split between those who see it as a bit of harmless fun and those who worry it’s encouraging an interest in the occult.
In the 1970s, there were moral panics around Halloween. And what came out in the 1970s? The first of the slasher movie franchise centred on the Michael Myers character, in 1978 to be exact, to really put the wind up.
I did my time escorting my children around Karori in a prelude to sugar-fuelled chaos. I don’t have a Halloween T-shirt, but I’ll be at the Terror-Fi Movie Festival. Which isn’t a problem, because my house is so high up a hill that nobody swings by anyway.
