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Halloween: turning to the supernatural to work through our anxieties

Halloween is now firmly part of the seasonal and consumer calendar – but, unlike other celebrations that promote gift-giving, family, love and friendship, Halloween involves disruption, transgression and an open engagement with darker emotions and fears. These aspects have caused US sociologist Amitai Etzioni to describe Halloween as a “tension-management holiday”. This suggests Halloween is a public ritual in which repressed social and cultural anxieties might be safely expressed and relieved.

The expressions include rituals such as carving ugly faces into vegetables, ducking for apples and dressing up as dark or supernatural figures. That these feature around the world in various…

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Articles of Interest

Halloween Quiz: Test Your Knowledge Of Global Disease Costumes

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How to avoid a Halloween sugar disaster

For many people, Halloween means dressing their kids up like cute little superheroes. Unfortunately, the holiday can also stress many parents as they try to manage the deluge of candy that children bring home from trick-or-treating. Over-consumption of sugary treats on a single day is of no great concern for health. Sustained over-consumption can, however, lead to a number of negative health effects in children.

How to Stay Sane About Halloween Candy

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It’s Halloween. Beware Urban Legends (and Cars).

It’s the risks to costumed little pedestrians that should worry parents, not tainted candy or razor blades in apples.

We Asked Health Experts About the Safest Methods for Trick-or-Treating...

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A Healthier Halloween

Halloween is most often associated with sweet treats — and lots of them. For many of us, it also kicks off a holiday season filled with excessive eating and drinking, which is why the average American gains one to four pounds between October 31 and January 1.

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Many adults are looking for healthier options to give to treat-seekers at their doorstep. Here are some of my go-tos for All Hallow's Eve.

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But we as consumers can fight back by exercising our free choice. So this Halloween, make sure your children fill up their goody bags—while warning them against overindulging, of course—and enjoy the holiday while they can. If the Food Police get their way in some future Halloween, kids engaged in trick-or-treating might be confronted with the command, “Put down the candy corn and step away from that Milky Way!”

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Why allowing your kids to binge on Halloween may actually make them healthier.

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And how many children have been harmed by randomly poisoned trick-or-treat candy? Approximately zero. It turns out that the Halloween sadist is about 1 percent fact and 99 percent myth.

The myth of poisoned Halloween candy

So why do these concerns stick around? Best gave me a theory: “We live in a world of apocalyptic scenarios. Here we are; we have safer, healthier, longer lives than people in any other point in history. And we are constantly imagining that this could all fall apart in a nanosecond.” He added, “So I think that what happens is we translate a lot of our anxiety into fears about our children.”

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Trick or Treat for UNICEF

Working with UNICEF made me grow up and recognize how fortunate I am - Roger Moore

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Resources

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In the decades or centuries they’ve existed, hospitals have had a long time to accrete stories — some of them the spooky kind. Haunted hospitals are often beautiful old buildings long past their useful days. And owing to long-held stigmas around mental illness, it should be no surprise that a lot of the places now deemed haunted once held people with little-understood brain disorders.

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When you think of unhealthy holidays, Halloween may be one of the first to come to mind. With all the high-sugar, empty-calorie treats around, it’s not hard to imagine why. But, believe it or not, celebrating Halloween can actually offer several health benefits.

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Add lights and smoke and just a bit of body horror.

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While parents may be most concerned about risks from tainted candy or choking hazards, by far the larger risks to children on Halloween are from injuries related to costumes and danger posed by motor vehicles . In many respects, Halloween gives people license to step out of their everyday persona and experiment with playing a new role or being a different character. When combined with alcohol and drug use, the risk for bodily injury skyrockets.

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Spooky, scream-inducing characters whose health has clearly taken a turn for the worse - skeletons and ghosts, for example - are as much a part of Halloween fun as pumpkins and candy. But once the creepy decorations are put away, some frightening health facts can haunt us year-round - and should prompt us to take action.