Halloween

[Only two days late. Much better than that time that I skipped the entirety of September.]

October 25th. The first day of Halloween week. And so, it begins.

Time to buy your Halloween candy. Finish carving your jack-o-lanterns. Make sure that you’ve RSVP’d to whatever parties you’re attending. Or make sure that all the preparations are made for the party that you’re throwing. Make sure your costume is finished. (Or, if you’re me, start panicking because it isn’t yet really started.) Buy more Halloween candy because you suddenly realize you’ve already eaten all the stuff you bought at the beginning of the week already. Figure out new and inventive ways to frighten small children. The usual stuff.

And then, in your alone time, you start thinking about sweet young things (not too young, mind you) heading out to Halloween parties all dressed up as lusty vampire girls. Or deceptively innocent looking lasses wearing schoolgirl outfits with their hair done up in pigtails. Or sexy devil girls in red bikinis with tails, wearing plastic horns and carrying tridents. Or – ooh! – hot chicks wearing tight revealing clothing and clown make-up . . . I think of these women, and I suddenly NEED some alone time.

Women in costumes. You gotta love this time of year. And it’s not just the costumes. It’s everything. The kid in me loves the season. The adult in me loves the season. And the ‘adult’ in me loves the season. (That last one was the same ‘adult’ that’s synonymous with ‘mature audiences only’, in case you were wondering.)

But as much focus as I typically put into the whole costuming aspect of it each year, there’s so much more to Halloween than the simple masquerade.

If I had more internet time available to me, I’d do research and then ramble on mock-authoritatively about how Christianity decided to set All Saint’s Day around the same time as Samhain in the hopes of stealing converts from the Pagans. If that’s what my research revealed. I’ve heard that’s why Christmas is positioned so close to the winter solstice, and why the tree is a symbol of the holiday and whatnot. I’ve always assumed that the same was the case with Halloween, but never really bothered to check. I suppose that if you’re interested then I’ve just given you a fun little project of your own. Yay!

But at any rate, Samhain is (at?) the end of October. The last day of October is All Hallow’s Eve, which is followed by All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. And those same three days are also los Dias de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that all of us dangerously unilingual English speakers know as the Day of the Dead.

So, just according to the previous paragraph, October 31st is the following things: a Pagan harvest festival and Wiccan religious observance, a Christian go-to-church-and-pray-for-the-dead holy day, and the beginning of a joyous three day long festival that celebrates those who have passed on. Have I missed anything? Hmm . . . It seems like I missed one . . . Oh yeah! It’s also fucking Halloween!

A lot of people will tell you that All Hallow’s Eve and Halloween are the same thing. These are the same people who insist that Independence Day and the Fourth of July are the same holiday. (Independence Day is a patriotic celebration of the birth of our country. The Fourth of July is a barbecue holiday about pretty lights in the sky and blowing stuff up. They evolved from the same source, but they’re now two different things that just happen to occur on the same day.) Halloween is about costumes and trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns and candy and parties and so on. It’s also about haunted houses and monsters and black cats and bats and spiders and the like. Halloween is there for you to have fun.

The kids have fun at their level, the adults have fun at their level, and the ‘adults’ . . . heh heh heh! Well, you can pervert any of the major holidays with an overlay of kinky sex themes, but maybe none quite so well as Halloween.

The holiday owes much of it’s conceptual debt to Samhain. And while it was widely celebrated as a harvest festival at one time, the happy farmer just doesn’t seem like a good spokesperson for a scary holiday. Enter the witch. Another major celebrant of Samhain, she seems like a much more likely candidate for traditional Halloween imagery.

The iconic witch is ugly. Green skin, with a big wart on her nose. She’s also a cartoon. She’s an opponent for Bugs Bunny, or a cardboard cut-out you buy with the rest of your Halloween decorations at Wal*Mart. She’s not an accurate depiction of anything. (I think that her wardrobe choices are a weird permutation on the pilgrim-style clothing worn during the witch-hunt era, and the ugliness is there as a deterrent to young people seeing witchcraft as glorious. But then, that’s based on nothing but stuff rolling around in my head.)

The ‘modern’ witches are the girls from Charmed. Or hot redhead Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Today’s witches are non-pointy hat wearing, non-broom riding, pagan oriented, wiccan defined women of the natural realm. They perform ceremonies in the woods under moonlight, without the hindrance of clothing. Like Frank Black sings in ‘Goodbye Lorraine’, “She said if we’ll be witches / then there must be nakedness”. And unless you’re a nudist, naked means sexual, which tells you what the witch is really all about in the mind of the average male.

Where goes the theme of the witch, so goes the theme of the black cat, as the black cat is the witch’s familiar.

The cat (not necessarily black) was the symbol of Bast, the Egyptian Goddess of Hedonism. The Goddess of Doin’ It. Cats tend to slink around. In fashion, slinky things are sexy things. I could continue on, and make all kind of connections between sexuality/sensuality and cats (my God, they spend all day licking themselves!), but I’m allergic to cats, and am therefore not going to waste time singing the praises of a bunch of goofy snotmakers.

All Saints/All Souls. Day of the Dead. Any interaction between the living and the subjects of the immediately aforementioned holidays usually means contact with ghosts. Boo!

When I was first taking notes for this post, I remember having a sexual connection with ghosts in mind to discuss, but apparently didn’t write it down. And do you think that I can remember what it was? Nope. I do have a somewhat sexual-type theory that makes reference to ghosts, but that’ll be in another post later on in Halloween week. It doesn’t really fit here.

According the parapsychologists and ghost hunters (and popularized by the Ghostbusters mythos) when a ghost comes into physical contact with something, it leaves behind a gooey slimy residue called ectoplasm. A ghost taking physical form takes a form made of ectoplasm. Gooey and slimy. Like semen. Like lube. This isn’t the sexual connection that I had, but was something I was going to (and just did) mention as a kind of pervy side note.

Anyway, there are all sorts of monsters roaming about on Halloween. Ghosts, ghouls, zombies, vampires, werewolves, swamp monsters, mummies, things that go ‘bump’ in the night (scientific classification: Nocturnal Colliders), nameless things, shapeless things, nameless and shapeless things, Chihuahuas on stilts, and volunteers going door-to-door with political fliers. Creepy!

The classic “Universal Monsters” – named for a group of characters from monster movies by Universal Studios back in the black-and-white era – have become part of the accepted Halloween theme. The Frankenstein Monster, Count Dracula, the Wolfman, uh . . . who else . . . the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy . . . ? Yeah, I really couldn’t tell you. Frankenstein’s monster I’m absolutely sure was from Universal in it’s classic film incarnation, and I’m about 95% certain about Dracula. I’m pretty sure that the Wolfman was, too. If I’m wrong about the others, well, blame Wikipedia for not having a toll-free number for us internet-less losers.

I don’t know if the monster types that these specific monsters represented were part of Halloween monster ‘canon’ prior to these movies or not. Were little kids scared of vampires on October 31st more after the release of Dracula than they were beforehand? Same question about werewolves and The Wolfman? Mummies? Swamp Monsters? Abominations stitched together from dead guys? (Okay, so, the Frankenstein monster is kind of specific. But still . . . ) Which came first: Halloween vampires or Halloween Dracula? Monster chicken or haunted egg?

And isn’t it interesting that all of these monsters were incredibly horny? Demanding, seducing, or chasing after a woman or women? Dress up in a costume for Halloween and you can act like someone else for the night. Dress up like a monster – one of the classic monsters – and you’re almost expected to chase women. In a comedic fashion, if nothing else. A Frankenstein Monster mask and the phrase “Fire Bad . . . Woman Pretty . . . “ might be a nice icebreaker at a costume party. (At the right kind of party, look down at your pants and finish the phrase with “. . . Erection Confusing . . . “ then look back up at the woman like maybe she has an answer for you. Maybe she does.

The classic mummy leads us to thoughts of bondage. Particularly the whole encasement bondage thing. The complete mummy includes the sarcophagus, which is just another layer of containment for someone who gets off on that sort of thing.

Werewolves are primal. Primal is eat, sleep, fight, fuck. Eat, sleep, fight, fuck is sexy. Or, depending on how you combine those elements, really kind of kinky. And then if you’ve got the furry fetish, or lycanthropy fetish, or really any kind of major wetness or hardness for general anthropomorphism, then you’re good to go on other levels as well.

Vampires, in this day and age, seem to be the big draw. At their core, the vampire is all about sex. They seduce with a hypnotic glance. They dress well. And most tellingly . . . The fang penetrates and blood is a bodily fluid. Does that remind you of anything?

Bats followed vampires into Halloween because of the whole alternate vampiric form thing. Especially Dracula with his shifting into a bat (or a wolf, or fog, but usually a bat). Bats, rats, etc. Christmas has reindeer. Halloween has vermin.

I’m not actually into the concept of sex play with real animals. And I’m certainly no fan of rats under any circumstances. So trying to come up with a sexual context with the vermin took me a minute. But it’s the mindfuck. The phobia play. It’s asking the submissive, “What are you willing to let me do to you in exchange for me not unlocking and opening this box of rats and letting them run freely about this room that you’re currently tied to a chair in?”

Jack-o-Lanterns. The origin of the Jack-o-Lantern is usually a story about a man named Stingy Jack. And there are many, many different versions of this story. But basically, at some point in his life, Jack ends up either trapping the Devil and only agreeing to let him go if the Devil agrees to never take him into Hell, or else Jack simply pisses the Devil off and the Devil vows that he’ll never allow Jack into Hell. Then Jack dies, and discovers that he’s sinned enough that they won’t let him into Heaven. So he wanders limbo for awhile, and eventually gives up and goes to the gates of Hell, and tries to get in, with no luck. When he complains that he can’t find his way around in limbo, the Devil tosses him a small piece of burning Hell coal, which Jack then sticks into a turnip which he carves holes in and uses as a lamp.

So, people in the real world started hallowing out turnips, carving faces in them, and putting small candles into them. (I hope to someday write a story that has the wide-ranging effect on society that the story of Stingy Jack had on his audience.) These Jack-o-Lanterns would eventually come to be used to scare off demons and monsters on Samhain. Fairly cheap protection for your household from all manner of evil creatures that might be prowling the night.

Once the holiday came to North America, someone discovered how much easier it was to carve a pumpkin than a turnip. And thus, the pumpkin slowly evolved into the Jack-o-Lantern of choice. (I’ve never carved a turnip. I probably should, just for bragging rights. I have carved a Jack-o-Lantern or two out of the hide of the evil, evil watermelon, however.)

The Jack-o-Lantern has continued evolving. While the simple face is still prevalent, the pumpkin has become an actual artistic medium come October each year. Illuminated carvings of all sorts can be found adorning pumpkins of all sizes. And where there’s art, there’s also erotic art. That’s right . . . pumpkins can be a viable medium for porn. Carve some pumpkins to offend the neighbors. (Or possibly arouse your neighbors, and get an invitation to a neighborhood Halloween orgy you previously knew nothing about!)

And if that’s not enough pumpkin-based sex for you, then guys, try this – before cutting out the top piece or scooping out the guts, cut out the eyes and nose. Then cut a mouth based on the size of your erect cock. You can either stop there, or slice some eyelashes in above the eyes, giving you what I like to call a Jill-o-Lantern. Heat up the mouth area with a hair dryer. Slather some lube around her mouth (inside and out), and then penetrate. It’s actually not really all that fun at all. More painful than arousing, really. That thick pumpkin shell is hard. I would imagine that with a bigger dick than mine, you’d end up with more of it actually fucking the mass of pumpkin guts, which was kind of the sensation I was aiming for (and missed). I had to work like heck to actually achieve orgasm via the Jill-o-Lantern blowjob, but once I was naked on the floor with my hard cock in a hole in a pumpkin, I was committed. I figured the only way I could have felt stupider is if I didn’t finish. (Or if I’d been caught, I suppose. Thank God that didn’t happen. “He says, as he admits his depraved actions to the entire internet.”)

Ghosts are part of Halloween, and one of the places that they can be found is in a haunted house. So, the haunted house becomes part of Halloween. Both the ‘real’ haunted houses where unexplained phenomenon have occurred and ghosts have been reported, and spooky fundraising drives where you buy tickets to walk through a building all tricked out with various fright effects.

I haven’t been in a Halloween haunted house since I was a kid. When I was a kid I bought my tickets and walked through several. The things I remember the most was that at some point there was always an arm that came from out of nowhere and grabbed you. One room had chains hanging from the walls, . . . and life-sized skeletons hanging from the chains. There was usually ‘bloody’ torture equipment. A soundtrack of creeks and thumps was played from hidden speakers, alternating with moans and groans. That sort of stuff.

After having been in the temporary dungeon set up for KinkFest, all I can really think regarding haunted houses is that I want to see an ‘adult’ one. Real victims hanging from those chains. Torturer doms working over more victims, putting that torture equipment to good use. That sort of thing. You don’t need fake bodies and ketchup . . . you just need some decent security barriers and a couple of people into bloodplay.

What else? Trick-or-Treating began way back at the dawn of time, and was basically just poor people going door to door begging for food on holidays. Two of the biggest days for this was All Hallow’s and Christmas Eve. One would evolve into Trick-or-Treating, the other Wassailing (and later still it’s watered down form ‘Christmas Caroling’).

[I’d like to go door to door begging for sex. But all my faithful readers already suspect that, so let’s move this along.]

Trick-or-Treat. Sounds like a question you’d ask a prostitute, doesn’t it? Are you going to turn a trick here, or treat me to a freebie? Then we get the extended version from the playground. Trick-or-Treat, Smell My Feet, Give Me Something Good To Eat! Yeah, that one throws in references to foot fetishism and oral sex.

This holiday is (or at least can be) just out-and-out perverted! You’ve simply got to look for the clues.