Skeletons and Saints at Halloween and After
Repeated history, Reformation, and the promise of heaven
So what’s with all the skeletons everywhere?
They started popping up around here in early September. Twelve-foot monstrosities towering in front lawns, smaller ones but still life-size dressed as pirates or carnival barkers (a yard within a mile of us has an entire skeleton fair theme, with a “Rotton Candy” stand, a Ferris Wheel, and other morbid frivolities I haven’t slowed down to observe). I’ve seen a skeleton mother in an outdoor folding chair next to a skeleton child, in what looked like a bird cage. There are skeletons emerging from the ground next to fake tombstones, skeletons carrying other skeletons to—their graves? They’re on advertisements, on doors and walls at a new Mexican restaurant down the street, and even colorful skulls on cacti pot holders.
How times haven’t changed. In this interesting article from two years ago, “What’s behind the fascination with dancing skeletons?”, John McDonald writes that medieval and subsequent art depicting skeletons demonstrated the reality and inevitability of death. For people around the time of the Reformation, lifespans were short—43 was the average—and perhaps it was an impetus to a macabre philosophy: since we’re all returning to dust soon, we might as well make the end look fun, even if it’s not. “The Dance of Death was one of the few truly egalitarian things in a rigidly hierarchical age. Death did not discriminate between kings and commoners, priests and peasants.” And in a thoroughly religious age, people didn’t shy away from the morbid truth of their own flesh decaying and dying. In a sense, it was a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” view of the body decomposing.
Our skeleton fascination is somewhat different today, though, than in medieval times. McDonald made the point in 2021 that
[in] the Middle Ages people lived with death and thought about it every day, but today we put it out of our minds, wishing it would go away. It’s almost axiomatic that as a society begins to believe in its own perfection it wants less and less to do with this intractable subject. When Death comes knocking on the door and invites us to dance, we pretend there’s nobody at home.
Unless, I’d add, we want to put skeletons on our lawns and act like death is a joke.
Today is Halloween, or All Saints’ (or Hallows’) Eve, the day before All Saints’ Day, a major Christian holiday long held on November 1. Halloween is the first day in Allhallowtide—a three-day series of related holy days having to do with the dead. The Day of the Dead, or All Souls’ Day, is November 2, a day for people to pray for souls in Purgatory. Because by “saints” we mean those who have died in the faith, this season has long held supernatural overtones. But we have taken legitimate grief and loss and made it into a material fest, complete with lawn decorations—and many other kinds of household frivolity—of the undead.
My oldest daughter told me yesterday at dinner that Halloween as we know it really started as a way for people to dress up and confuse and make fun of the demons who, it seemed, would walk around with the souls of the dead. The costumes were a protection of sorts. We’ve mostly lost this meaning of the ritual in 2023, but it makes sense that in our particularly secular age, an historic time where remembrance of departed souls comes close makes the demons seem closer, too. But what we see now with the skeletons and ubiquitous Halloween horror appears more an appeal to the darkness than anything approaching the Light of Christ.
Today, October 31, is also The Feast of the Reformation (read about it here in “A Little Reformation Encouragement” on Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller’s Substack). Sure, Halloween can be fun for the kids—dressing up, running around in the dark, and best of all, getting boatloads (and boatloads) of candy! But we take seriously death and its consequences. We know that before Christ comes, we are destined to die in the flesh and join our brothers and sisters sleeping in the ground. Their skeletons are no laughing matter. We grieve for them, just as we look forward to their resurrection and the perfection of their bodies on the Last Day.
This is why All Saints’ Day, which we will mark on Sunday this year, is so special to us (please look at All The Household for great resources on this and other special days of the church year). We don’t pretend that death is merely an excuse for an overeating party, or for inviting in strange and unknown forces into our lives in a show of camaraderie. In case you didn’t know, demons are no joke, and they are out to get us. Remember “the old evil foe”? The Devil wants nothing better than to separate us from Christ. But we remember on these days that Christ defeated death forever for us. Beauty and richness and glory are coming. And there will be no more death.
