sweets and the hereafter

amerThere are orange streamers taped above the front door. There's a dish of candy on the table to my right. A few gently-rotting pumpkins sag against each other on the steps. My house-mate invited friends over last night to watch 'Scream'.

You'd think it was Halloween or something. Never mind that it's late spring in Botswana.

I don't think there's a more American holiday. I know the more orthodox contestants for that superlative are Thanksgiving and 4th of July. But I'm drawing my conclusion from my experiences of explaining to a few friends -- Batswana and Zimbabwean -- where Halloween comes from.

So I try to begin by explaining that Halloween is significant because it's the night before All Saints' Day, etc., etc. I do a little bit about early beliefs that this was the night when all the dead were though to appear and do mischief to the living, etc. This is when the eyebrows start to go up. Spirits? In America? In one of these explanations, I emphasized that it wasn't necessarily the spirits of one's relations who might cause the mischief; it could be anyone. (I was trying to draw a distinction between non-familial haunting and the trouble that one's dead ancestors, or badimo, can cause to a Motswana if he or she has pissed them off sufficiently.)

But then how to explain the rest? The idea that there might be ghosts and goblins around, and that one might want to light a jack o'lantern to frighten them away, or placate them somehow, makes some sense. After all, placating scary otherworldly things makes sense here, too. But how did it come that children dress up as these scary spirits -- huh?! -- and become the ones threatening mischief it they're not attended to? How do we get from Night of the Dead to Night of Children-Dressed-as-the-Dead?

Naturally, a structuralist interpretation presents itself: Children are the least dead, so having children dress up as otherworldly works as a nice inversion. And children dressed up as dead who threaten one in return for the most earthly of rewards -- namely, sweets -- also works.

But my friends this side are still hung up on the idea that Americans truck in spirits and witches to begin with. This is regarded with surprise, if not quite disbelief. None of it makes any bloody sense when I try to explain it, other than the recognized fact that Americans will do almost anything for sweets.