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A a Bay “gre atestof EVN

— 2.

 

> Christmas has nothing on the spookiest day of the year

Greg Waldock
Staff Writer

 

Heres: is far and away the greatest
of all our many annual celebrations.
It’s weird, diverse, and in most of North
America, it serves no purpose whatsoever
other than being fun. It introduces images
and ideas from cultures around the
world, resulting in weird fusions of totally
unrelated concepts, like mummies and
vampires being associated together. Most
importantly, I think it teaches us to not be
afraid, no matter what terrible evils exist
beyond our understanding or control.
Halloween is a bizarre celebration,
sometimes problematic, sometimes
innovative, but always entertaining.

Its origins are up for debate.
Loosely, it comes from harvest festivals,
celebrating the end of the farming
seasons with a huge feast. This

tradition is celebrated by nearly every
agricultural society around the world.

Halloween gets weird with its
imagery and themes. As you can
imagine, most harvest festivals aren't
so obsessed with death. The classic
mainstream Halloween iconography is
all about skeletons, ghosts, dim candles,
and pumpkins carved with terrifying
faces. Witches, demons, zombies, and
vampires are common, and are all
boiled down to their simplest images.
They're also inspired by religious
traditions from around the world.

I think Halloween is a strong
example of how cultural diffusion
works on a global scale. While there
are many good arguments that
Halloween encourages the harmful
practice of cultural appropriation and
misrepresentation—and I don’t disagree

with most of them—I think there’s a lot of

creative good here. It’s not just the story

Unhack your life

> Life hack culture has gone too far

Sophie Isbister
Contributor

 

ou know what I am really sick of? Life
hacks that aren't really life hacks.

Let me paint you a picture. I’m sitting
on my couch on a sunny afternoon. I’ve
got my phone in my hand, one pinkie
tucked under the bottom, scrolling with
my thumb, and what do I come across? A
video titled “Amazing Pie Hacks!” I think
to myself, hey, I love pie, I love life hacks.
I click the video, and what do I get?

Certainly not any pie hacks! I don’t
know what I was expecting a pie hack
to be: Cook a pie on your car’s radiator?
Add tuna water to the pastry to make
it extra fluffy? Whatever these pie
hacks were going to be, I wanted them.
What I ended up spending a full three
minutes watching—and then a full
month ranting about—turned out to be
just different ways of decorating a pie
crust with a plain old ordinary knife.

Where were the bobby pins? Where
were the binder clips? Where was the
four-inch piece of string? I came for
innovation, and all 1 got was something
I could have found by simply Googling
“Different ways to cut pastry.”

At first, I thought to myself, are
my expectations too high? Am I being
too harsh on the good people at Inane
Internet Videos Inc.? As it turns out,
my ire was not misplaced. My ire was
firmly in the right place, because
according to a cursory online search,

a life hack is defined as a strategy
designed to make everyday life more
efficient. When I think “efficient”
and “everyday,” my mind doesn’t
immediately leap to “Make a bunch of
pies for no reason.” I’m not trying to
enter any state fairs contests over here.
The pie hack video is disturbing on
at least two levels, the first being that it’s

not even a hack. The second reason that it
upset me so much came to me after a little

bit of soul searching, which lead me to
ask the question: Would it be so bad ifthe
video was just titled “Amazing Pie Tips,”
or, “Cool New Designs for Pie Crusts”?

What’s wrong with just having
pie tips? Why do we have to oversell it,
and get people to click on something,
thinking it’s a hack, just to be turned
away empty handed and extremely
disappointed? C’mon Internet, you know
I'd watch the video even if you didn’t try
to package it as a hack. Let tips be tips!

If everyone could just consider my
humble proposal regarding the labeling
of hot tips on the Internet: If you want
to publish something and call it a life
hack, first ask yourself, “Does this tip
subvert the typical usage of a common,
household item?” And then ask yourself,
“Is this tip significantly easier than doing
something the ordinary way?” And finally
consider, “Is this tip something my aunt
could already read about in Canadian
Living magazine?” If you answer yes
to any or all those questions, maybe
don’t call your stupid tip a life hack.

of immigrants coming to North America

and bringing their own traditions, though

that’s also a huge part of it. To me, it’s
more the story of international discovery
and enthusiasm for reinterpreting the
new. For example, since the Haitian
practice of zombification became known
mainstream, it’s been reinterpreted as
a horror concept used to explore the
dangers of consumerism. Now, the
Western interpretation of zombies is a
cornerstone of filmmaking. While we
should be aware of how this impacts
Haitian traditional culture and our view
of it, ] also think diversity for diversity’s
sake is a good thing. New art always has
merit, and Halloween is full of new art.
The other major positive with
Halloween is its unique approach to fear.
Demons, evil spirits, and ghosts were
and still are massively feared things;
supernatural forces that can ruin lives
and exist far beyond our human ability

S

 

QUENT ae

Screenshot from ‘Charlie Brown’

to understand or fully perceive no doubt
sounds terrifying. Halloween defeats
this fear and encourages us to dress kids
up in demon costumes to ask for candy.
Halloween encourages us to animate

a skeleton dancing to “Spooky Scary
Skeletons” in a badly-drawn graveyard.
It gives us fragile, mundane humans

a chance to laugh at the face of true
unnatural evil itself, to acknowledge
the inevitable unfairness of death and
still go to a party dressed as a pirate.

I believe that underneath the
silliness, candy, and rampant alcoholism,
there’s a very serious aspect of Western
culture here. Maybe you can interpret
it as us mocking cultural beliefs around
the world, and you might not be wrong.
I prefer to see it as our culture, for
one day, teaming up with our kids
and rejecting fear of the supernatural
itself. Or maybe I just want to get
trashed and carve a pumpkin.

ae é ,
P ¢
wy
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