Then and now

Another All Saints’/Souls’ Day, or Halloween is upon us, depending on your point if view. Whether you see it as a time of remembrance, or another reason to go on vacation. I look forward once again to visiting the final resting place of my parents, along with my brothers and their families. It has been seven years since we were orphaned, and a lot has happened in their untimely absence. I got married, my eldest brother’s son got his first job, my younger brother had another baby, and many more events that could have been much happier had they been around. But All Saints’/Souls’ Day gives us the opportunity to remember all the happy times we shared as a family, and at the same time pay our respects to the people who literally and figuratively gave us our lives.

 Halloween has also indeed become so commercialized, just like Christmas and Valentine’s! I remember when me and my older brother were kids, we were literally scared out of our wits during Halloween! Mainly because of all the stories handed down through generations of relatives, friends, even the household help! We grew up in the era of Christopher Lee as the perennial Dracula, complete with inch-long fangs, bloodshot eyes, paper white face and bloody lips! Peter Cushing was always there to kill him though. There was no internet, and TV was at its most basic of programming. So all information came from the movies! And Hammer Studios had it down to an art and a science! Monsters at that time were really monsters, out to devour o destroy you! We stayed clear of dark places, and the night belonged to “them”. That was then. Don’t ask what year.

 But now, things have really changed. Today, vampires are good looking, can come out in the sun although their skin would sparkle, carry guns, create synthetic blood and even have “teleseryes”! Halloween is just an excuse for the kids to go house to house and make dentists richer. They have been so desensitized from all the horror, nothing scares them anymore except for the occasional Korean ghost story. Bloody, disfigured, mangled faces get laughed at, while they run in fear of a girl whose face is covered with long black hair and opens her mouth like a whale shark! Guilty.

 Commercial establishments like malls, stores, banks even hospitals, of all places, are adorned with all things supposedly scary. Why are spider webs scary? They show a dirty house, not a scary one! And I don’t know, but bats and spiders no longer do anything to me, scare-wise. A jar full of Aedes Aegypti female mosquitoes, now that’s scary! Seriously, it takes a lot to scare people nowadays. Things like unemployment, credit card bills, tuition and the like. Dracula and his ilk have lost their touch, relegated to malls and specialty shops all over the world, scaring only their future. But even in this age of Twilight, True Blood and Zombieland, I hope that those with dearly departed loved ones, do show their respects and pay them a visit. Nothing wrong with commercializing a holiday, as long as the true spirit, pun intended, of the day is also observed.

 They might be visited by those very loved ones, which I’m sure would ruin their day!