Trick or treat

By Cong Corrales

WHEN this column gets printed, many cute and adorable little brown Americans will be trick or treating in the malls and department stores in the city. Little zombies, witches, ghouls, and other scary fictional characters will be galloping across the malls with their parents in tow.

Along with the Feast of Saturnalia (read: Christmas), Halloween is among the most favorite pagan holidays this predominantly Catholic city loves to celebrate. Starting this week, malls and department stores are expected to cash in on Ol’ Hallow’s Eve. Parents are expected to respond to this profit-driven feeding frenzy, too.

How did these all start? How did Filipinos pick up this tradition that came from the other side of the globe?

Halloween, as a holiday, was first practiced more than a thousand years ago among the Celts, a tribe in Ireland and the island of Great Britain. They had a feast they called Samhain. It is celebrated on the exact day that Halloween is observed now — Oct. 31.

You see, the Celtic calendar begins on Nov. 1. There was then a widespread belief in western cultures that souls, including spirits (No, not the kind that you drink) roam around on the eve of a new year.

Around this time of the year is the start of winter in many countries in the western hemisphere. I don’t have to tell you how devastating winter is to crops in these countries. With the low harvest, the Celts believed that evil spirits cursed their farm produce and not the cold front that is slowly enveloping their countries.

This further cements their need to observe Samhain to exorcise the evil spirits. They slaughtered cows and used their bones as bonfire kindles.

When the Holy Roman Empire invaded England in 100 AD, they imposed a kind of Christianity they developed by the Empire from the belief that the followers of Jesus Christ were persecuted after his death in around 33 AD. The Celts incorporated this belief in their observance of Samhain.

From warding off evil spirits, the holiday has now morphed to include remembering Christian martyrs. They now called the evening before Nov. 1 as All Hallows E’en (holy evening), which has been shortened to what is now one of the popular holiday called Halloween.

This holiday arrived on American shores along with the wave of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. The immigrants introduced Halloween to Americans that later became assimilated into the American culture.

As we have learned in our world history subject, the latter part of the 19th century saw America struggling with a crisis of overproduction which then drove them to expand their markets for its products. The Irish immigrants, who were now American citizens, were among the invading forces that were sent to South America to as far as Cuba and the Philippines.

Of course, when the Americans colonized the Philippines it also brought along their culture and traditions, which now includes Halloween. Filipinos readily embraced this holiday. We can thank the Spanish Catholic colonizers for that. Plus, we have our own home-grown folklore that made it easy to “understand” the holiday that is supposed to ward off evil spirits — that now includes tikbalang, aswang, and tiyanak.

However, every day is Halloween in the Philippines these days.

But it is not the fun kind of Halloween. Here, it is mostly trick rather than treat. Worse, the “tricks” are done by creatures far scarier than the undead and ghouls — hound politicians, warmongering generals, and ninja cops.

Have a happy trick or treating, pagans. Pfft.