Black Gate

I hope you’ll forgive me for stepping off topic this week. We’ll return to Gilgamesh soon, but today, I wanted to talk to you about something different.

Writing. The process, not the product, which is what I usually blog about here at Black Gate. I’m surrounded by true professionals and artists here, so it feels like hubris to presume upon the subject. But as that has rarely stopped me before, I shall forge ahead.

Many of you reading this have heard of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. For those who haven’t, the idea is that if you write 1,666 words a day for every day of November, you’ll end up with fifty thousand words, or, in some genres, a novel. The idea is that everybody does it in one giant nationwide frenzy, cheering each other on, swapping tips, hosting write-a-thons in which people chug coffee and type like the wind. Winning means getting fifty thousand words. They don’t have to be great. They don’t have to be good. They just have to be on the page.

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On Friday night, as the light waned and the sky turned the color of mildewed pumpkins, that familiar holy chant began resounding up and down the streets: “Trick or Treat!”

Wee supplicants bedecked in strange garb began their door-to-door pilgrimages to receive the benediction of sugared confections by the handfuls.

Hallowe’en partly descends from All Hallows’ Eve (on its good Catholic mother side — the one who married some pagan dude and their offspring got really weird and started bobbing for apples and wearing William Shatner masks). All Hallows’ Eve was once a prologue to All Saints’ Day. Not many recall that that one nowadays. By dint of Hallowe’en falling on Friday this year, many bars, restaurants, and homes expanded their Hallowe’en celebrations to encompass Saturday, creating the irony of All Hallows’ Eve not only overshadowing, but completely usurping the day of the saints.

The time of feasts and holy days is nigh upon us. Now our most cherished holidays both secular and religious come in quick succession: after Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving and Christmas before the lull of the long, gray winter.

After a couple dull months, a certain bow-wielding matchmaker sneaks in to liven things up a little. He is soon followed by those green-bedecked, Guinness-swigging leprechauns who are ambassadors of a saint who drove snakes out of a place that never had any snakes.

Valentine and Patrick won’t miss losing All Saints’ Day since they each have their own, but they — one a third-century Roman martyr and the other a fifth-century Romano-British missionary — might well wonder how they became the de facto saints of heart-shaped candy and risqué greeting cards on the one hand and green beer on the other. Along with a certain fourth-century Greek bishop named Nikolaos, they could form a support group for saints whose legends bear little resemblance to their actual lives, while also making their names among the most well-known on the planet.

Not that it matters to most of us. The holy days and the names attached to them were always more-or-less excuses to do what humans have been doing (or wanting to do and feeling really guilty about it) throughout history: looking for reasons to get together and celebrate and dress in silly clothes. If there is a benevolent God, that Prime Mover may well wonder why we feel such a strong need to have an excuse.

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