Dear Salem,
I write today with a warning: Something wicked this way comes.
With Halloween nigh, the dark tourists lurk, eager to revel in your city’s macabre past under the moon’s wan light. We in New Orleans can certainly relate.
Admittedly, the dark-and-stormy brand of heebie-jeebies sought by visitors to your neck of the woods are a different flavor than that found here. For you, it is all about witchcraft and whisperings of black magic. Down here, we are more about vampires and voodoo.
OK, and witchcraft and black magic. And swamps and pirates and rougarous and fifolet and ghosts and Madam Lalaurie and …
Suffice it to say, we’ve got more than our share of darkness down here at the end of the world, and a costuming tradition to go with it – which helps explain why darkhearts and dreadheads haunt the city this time every year.
The point is, as different as they are, Salem and New Orleans share enough in common to be kindred spirits of sorts.
We both, for example, bear the mark of Hanna-Barbera, which puts us in exclusive company. (Can you name another real-world city outside of Salem and New Orleans that has figured prominently in a “Scooby-doo” cartoon?)
But in the interest of setting the record straight, and in an ongoing effort to explain New Orleans customs to the world, we must confess a dark little secret: We have not always been a true Halloween town.
There’s no debating the region’s goblin-friendly mystique, mind you. But it is only recently — say, in the past 20 years — that New Orleans has become a bona fide Halloween tourist destination.
The once-annual Voodoo Music Experience was an early force in that movement. Anne Rice’s popular Vampire Ball and those bloodsucker books of hers were even earlier ones.
But in the past couple of decades, we’ve seen the addition of haunted house attractions, dark festivals and even a Carnival-style Halloween parade. In the process, the spooky season down here has become a Halloween lover’s dream.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. I’m sure our local businesses are only too happy to sell them all the eye of nutria they can fit in their cauldrons.
But – and here comes the real warning – one must wonder if we’re not unwittingly trading something precious for that.
A dive into The Times-Picayune archives reveals that D.H. Holmes, Solari’s and other local merchants were marketing seasonally inspired cakes and candies for Halloween parties as early as 1925, but the phrase “trick or treat” didn’t make its first appearance in the paper until 1944.
It was still such a relatively new practice in 1947 that the newspaper saw fit to explain it to its readers. “In many Northern cities,” it wrote, “the little folk mask and clothe themselves in outfits reminiscent of New Orleans Carnival costumes, then troup through their home neighborhood, ringing doorbells and giggling ‘Tricks or Treats!’”
The most telling part of that story, however, are its opening words. It begins: “All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day …”
It seems New Orleanians of the time couldn’t be expected to know when Halloween was – but everybody and their meemaw knew All Saints’ Day.
Imported from Europe through the city’s French-Catholic traditions, it has long been a special observation in New Orleans, and not just because it happens to be the day on which the New Orleans Saints were founded in 1966 (but, you know: Who Dat and all).
Rather, it is a central element in our burial traditions, a day on which the faithful trek to local cemeteries, where they clean the graves of their dearly departed. Flowers are left behind, prayers said and tears shed.
A far cry from the more festive customs for which the city is better known, it is a somber, sacred day, at once melancholy but also beautiful with its poignant intermingling of faith, love and loss, and a touching manifestation of our collective preoccupation with death.
Sadly, All Saints’ Day isn’t observed as universally here as it once was. A hundred years ago, local cemeteries were packed with people. “Throngs” is the word the Picayune used to describe it then.
Nowadays, a steady trickle of visitors can be spotted at our more prominent graveyards every Nov. 1. The throngs, however, are largely absent, presumably sleeping off the previous night’s potent mix of pumpkin juice and candy corn.
Which is exactly how traditions wither and die.
Scary thought.
Insincerely yours,
New Orleans
Ask Mike Have a question or a thought to share about New Orleans etiquette or tradition? I’d love to hear it. Email it to playbook@myneworleans.com