Isn't Halloween Just Weird??

For once a year, we decorate--actually go to the trouble to decorate--our homes with cobwebs, corpses, skeletons, and other such kitsch specifically reminiscent of death, corruption, darkness, and the inevitable encroachment of entropy on us all. And what's more, we don't do so somberly, solemnly, despairingly, with a grim acknowledgment of the dark mystery of the grave that envelops us all--no, no, we celebrate it! We dress up in funny costumes, give candy freely to small children (the one sample of the population that needs least to be hopped up on sugar), we throw parties, we enjoy ourselves on Halloween!

What's our motivation here? Are we unconsciously containing the dread of the hereafter by trivializing it, making levity of it, neutralizing the nameless horror by embracing it whole-heartedly, not simply "staring into the abyss until the abyss stares back into you" but jumping on it gleefully and giving it a fat, wet kiss on the lips?

Maybe we reconcile ourselves to (or at least hide ourselves from) the necessity of dying by swathing ourselves in dead signifiers, since the symbol itself is lifeless? Perhaps we explore, through our costumes and kitsch, not the representation but the absence of signification, for we shall all one day be literally absent from this earth itself?

Perhaps even we collectively participate in some some sort of Bakhtinian Carnivelesque, a burlesque grotesque-realism that degrades everything down to the ground in order to fertilize it and bring it back from the dead, more radiant and full of life than before, just as the Autumn leaves that Halloween inhabits will crumble down to silent (deathly) winter and be reborn as Spring again?

Some combination of all of these? None of these?

All I know is that I have a sudden hankering to carve a Jack-O-Lantern, be in a house with some cobwebs and plastic spiders and black cats, and that I will be dressing up as a "recursive Che" for the fiestas, and I sincerely hope I get some small children Trick-or-Treating for candy. If one of them is dressed in a white-sheet with holes a la Charlie Brown, it will make my night.