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It’s not only children that get excited about Halloween; it’s a holiday for the fun-loving and impish in all of us. Though adults may not be as hungry for sacks full of processed confections, we look forward to it every year for our own reasons: as an opportunity to dress up, act a little full-moon crazy, and for some, maybe even bob for hallucinogenic apples in a bucket of grain alcohol. It’s a chance to let your Mr. Hyde loose, hidden as he is by the Jekyll demands of the everyday. As the leaves change every year, we celebrate Halloween as a holiday of transformation—a one-night escape from the person you are the other 364 nights of the year.
The event we now know as Halloween has had a long and evolving history. Although the origin is sometimes attributed to medieval times, the idea of it actually started over 2,000 years ago with Samhain (pronounced sow-in). In addition to being an iconic band of the horror punk genre, Samhain was also the ancient Celtic New Year’s Eve. The Celts felt that the ghosts of the dead came to earth on this night; to keep them at bay, the people would dress up as animals and offer sacrifices to their gods. Obviously, the Halloween of today is a far cry from ritual sacrifice, but the basic elements still remain: people get together, put on a disguise, and get a little weird.
New York City always has been okay with a little oddity—it celebrates its minions and misfits; embraces its wired, its poor, its befuddled and hapless. Every year, the City invites one and all to the nation’s largest and most outrageous Halloween procession of peculiar pageantry: the Village Halloween parade.
Started (appropriately) by a mask-maker and puppeteer in 1973, the parade started as a simple walk from house-to-house in the streets of Greenwich Village. Although the festival organizers have always worked to maintain a neighborhood feel, over the years the parade gradually grew well beyond its original scope. Now it annually draws approximately 50,000 costumed participants and approximately 2 million spectators—making it the largest participatory parade in the country.
