The Power of the Dead and the Literal Ghosts

Halloween in the sense of trick and treating has already found its way into our psyche. The prospects are both hilarious and horrid.

Halloween in the format that was spawned in cities where crime rate is slow and where homes are not fenced-in is not the kind of feasting appropriate in most of our cities. As far as I know, the practice of trick-or-treat have been going on for some years now in a few gated communities in Metro Manila. In there, the candies given in those A-B villages satisfy the SES or socioeconomic status of the givers. If you live in those homes, you would not want your "treat" appraised as local? "Choc-nut" and our own "De-Limon do not have a place in this celebration. Think of "Cadbury" and "Mars." In fact, think of "Godiva."

This thing about people going crazy over Choc-nut is a new phenomenon, an affectation developed out of celebrity interviews. When asked by some people what their favorite chocolate are, these celebrities in some kind of reverse snobbery, would talk about the most ordinary candies or sweets. The impression given is that they, too, are regular guys and although they much want to remain so, their present celebrity and clout sort of stop them.

This is noblesse oblige in its most vulgar and irritating form.

This Halloween feeling extends to the new, edgy child-rearing practices parents have developed. As early as last week, children already were roaming the dark and dirty and dank streets of the city wearing red horns. Dear Mamas and Papas have finally come to the point that they are embracing the symbols of the Devil because they are kinda cute. Interesting again. At least, this is a big leap from mommies and daddies initiating the development of their children's language acquisition through modifiers like "dirty" and non-human creatures like the lizard.

Here is how it works: when the todder starts touching the wall or the floor, Papa/Mama says: No! Dirty! Or more accurately, "Darti." When the visitors come to visit the home, the proud parents show their pet children and point to the wall or the ceiling and mutter: "Look, lizard!" Or more faithfully to the reality: "Luk, Leesard!"

What is about lizards and the unclean spaces and the charm of the devil that seduce us to employ them in our parenting traditions?

Is it because these are things that have been imposed on us from outside and we are coping with our own sense of appraising the world outside?

Halloween and growing up are really tandem phenomena of (allow me to soar) of colonization. Gawd, that sounds "darti" but let me continue... The world of the unseen is perceived by us Bikolanos differently. The ghost is also the spirit. But where dumb TV writers in the major networks tend to make us think this season is the time when coffin covers swing open and citizen of the graves extricate themselves from the ground to be the living dead, I believe we have a more benevolent, a wiser way of remembering those who have gone ahead of us. Funnier too.

We eat and party during All Souls' Day. We call it even Pista nin mga Kalag. Feast of the Souls. Forget about the tricks because in the tricks are built-in the treats: stolen slippers or chicken, anything detachable and mobile at all, including underwear.

During funerals, it is customary to request the dead to carry all our afflictions. During our own Halloween, we should not be scaring or scared. We should be happy because the universe, it is said, allows our loved ones who passed on, to be back and perhaps - through the cool air of the gray November - hug us once more and make us feel that there is such a thing as eternal and perpetual love.