Halloween is right around the corner!
By Anjali Shastry
Halloween is right around the corner! Children dressed up as princesses and princes, witches and skeletons or a favorite super-hero will go about their neighborhoods trick-or-treating. But that is just part of what makes Halloween so memorable and meaningful for children.
Halloween started out as the festival of Samhain, a time at the end of summer when the Celts believed that spirits on the other side of the veil would roam the Earth. In order to scare the ghosts away, they would hold a big party. This tradition eventually became known as All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween.
If spirits roaming about sounds spooky to you, that’s because it is. And it’s meant to be.
For children, Halloween is a real-life extension of the world created by fairy tales: a magical, mysterious and somewhat ambiguous space and time filled with monsters and spirits, and also the heroes that defeat them.
Fairy tales are part of the oral tradition of storytelling. Some contain morals: don’t talk to strangers; listen to your parents; don’t eat someone else’s house, no matter how many gumdrops are on it.
Others are indeed frightening. There’s the impish trickster who will spin straw into gold for you — if only you’ll give him your firstborn. The girl who goes to visit her grandmother and finds instead a wolf dressed in the old lady’s clothes. Poisoned apples — enough said.
These tales can be found everywhere — from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, to India’s Panchatantra stories and the oral folklorico traditions in Mexico — to the friendlier versions we see today in pop culture.
According to the British Library, fairy tales are a sort of bildungsroman for young’uns, “formation” or “self-education” stories about young protagonists who learn through a series of challenges. Through their hero proxies, children learn to cope with rage, sadness, grief, discomfort, pain, and other negativity.
In his landmark 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, child psychologist and fairy tale expert Bruno Bettelheim wrote that fairy tales help children visualize and ultimately mitigate their innermost anxieties. “The child must somehow distance himself from the content of his unconsciousness and see it as something external to him [if he is] to gain any sort of mastery over it,” he wrote.
Essentially, fairy tales allow us to trifle with disaster from a safe distance.
These stories also serve as a jumping-off point for discussion. How would you handle being lost in the woods? What would you do if someone offered you a poisoned apple? Should you kiss a sleeping princess in a tall tower?
It isn’t just old fairy tales that have survived; new ones are always emerging.
A modern giant of fairy tales, Maurice Sendak, frightens children with Where The Wild Things Are. He believed children are complicated beings who experience profound emotional turmoil, and he addressed that dark side.
“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,” Sendak said. “And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”
Ultimately, fairy tales enthrall the imagination, and that is what engages children as they grow, learn, explore, create, and express their thoughts and feelings.
So this Halloween, take your kids on the adventure of a lifetime. Read them a fairy tale thoughtfully chosen to be appropriate for your child!
As writer G.K. Chesterton put it: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
