The Irony of this Day Designated "Hallow" or holy or sacred

Before the Bone Chilling Dead of Winter
Quelling Our Fears of Death, Abandonment, and Isolation in Eternal Darkness
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 31, 2010

Halloweeners may dress up like celebrities or other famous and infamous characters but the festival, rather spectacle, mostly dramatizes our fears of supernatural characters that could steal our souls and of horrid death itself.  The Grim Reaper is the King Specter on this date.  Bringing out in the open and associating these critters with treats, or tricks for October scrooges, as the case may be, makes them seem tamable, familiar, and even under our power, thereby fooling ourselves into thinking we are robbing them of the penultimate sinister foreboding, second only to process of dying or buried alive. 

Like the Dia de los Muertos, or séances with the dead, they make the afterlife more tolerable, even like death is merely a passage over to reunion with dead relatives for whom the empty, abandoned hearts left behind on earth, still yearn.  These strange holidays are like proxies for religion and particularly for religious funerals and burial ceremonies. 

The human heart seems incapable of incorporating its eventual non-existence.  The moment of encounter with the dead, even a dead pet, for most people, temporarily shatters their denial of their ultimate destiny for non-being. 

Religion and cathartic rituals and festivals will live on as humans are stuck with self-consciousness of being alive and vulnerable and yet with a definite but indeterminate expiration date.  The human heart never fully escapes the eternal sense of finiteness lurking in the dark corners and shadows of our minds.

The Prince of Darkness Hovers over All.

That is the Tragic Sense of Existence.