All My Children

Christmas is not the only children’s holiday which symbolically celebrates childbirth, fertility, and the rebirth of nature; May Day, which is hardly celebrated anymore in the United States, with its dance around the Maypole also used to be an occasion for festivities enjoyed particularly by children and youth, although with the active participation of the entire community. It was truly a day when “young and old came forth to play.” (Today May Day is still celebrated by the socialists in the old sense of heralding a new beginning.) The other great holiday celebrating a new beginning is Easter, the day of the Resurrection, a feast day celebrating rebirth. Without it, the story of Christ would end with his death by crucifixion, but with Easter, there is the beginning of a new life, of a new era, of new hope. Like Christmas, Easter was originally mainly a religious holiday, but it has now become an important children’s holiday.

As its ancient name and many of the rituals connected with it show, Easter also has deep symbolic meanings in connection with birth, rebirth, and fertility. The name Easter is derived from that of the German goddess Ostara, who was the goddess of spring and fecundity. Her symbol was the egg and her messenger the hare; this was the origin of the Easter egg and the Easter hare, or rabbit. The egg features prominently in creation myths all over the world to signify birth, and as early as the fourth century, eggs became connected with Easter ceremonies. In the twelfth century the Roman Catholic Church legitimized this connection by introducing the Benedictio Ovarum, authorizing the special use of eggs on the holy days of Easter. Ever since, the egg has played a prominent role in Easter celebrations, from the custom of egg-rolling to the hunt for Easter eggs by children and the giving of decorated eggs as special presents. The hare and later the rabbit were natural symbols of fertility because these animals reproduce so abundantly. The first German reference to the hare in connection with the Easter egg appears in 1572, but by then it was already an old custom. Many rituals, as well as common sense, attest to the symbolic connection between egg and birth. For example, among the Hungarian Gypsies, when a woman was enduring painful labor, her relations came to visit and one of them dropped an egg on her while they all sang: “The egg, the egg is round / And the belly is round; / Come child in good health! / God, God, calls thee!”

So all the great children’s holidays—birthdays (in some parts of the world the child’s name day), Christmas, Easter—are days which commemorate and celebrate birth and in this way assure the child that his arrival on this earth was a happy occasion, eagerly wished for by his parents and the world. The more we celebrate these occasions, the more certain the child can feel about being loved.

In order to gain emotional security, a child needs not only to be loved and cherished, but also to feel that his darker aspects can be accepted. The traditional Saint Nicholas’s Day ritual gives recognition to the fact that children cannot be good all the time, and so do certain customs around Eastertime when children’s asocial tendencies are allowed some scope. In Oxfordshire, England, for example, in times past, during the week before Easter gangs of boys and girls used to go around from house to house, extracting presents. When after they had sung some Easter song no gift was forthcoming, they would cry out: “Here sits a bad wife / The devil take her life / Set her upon a swivel / and send her to the devil.” Then the children would cut the latch of the door, stop the keyhole with dirt, or leave some other token of their displeasure in front of the door.

Another day used to give expression to the negative side of children’s ambivalence was April Fools’ Day, which was at one time a most joyous holiday in the juvenile calendar. All kinds of tricks were played on adults, who had to accept them in good humor. In addition, there were other such days depending on local customs, such as New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, or Shrove Tuesday, which was the occasion for cockfights, for rowdiness and rebellion. But Saint Nicholas’s Day was a particularly popular time for youngsters to let loose their negative attitudes. Black Peter or Grampus was the expression of adults‘ negative feeling toward children, but after the visit– or procession, as the custom might be—of Saint Nicholas had ended, later that evening and at night gangs of boys and girls who had blackened their faces boisterously roamed the streets, chasing everybody they met, smearing walls and windows, and in general playing havoc. This behavior, which had to be accepted by adults in good grace, was especially widespread in Holland.

Although in the United States we have no children’s holiday which centers so clearly and delightfully on ambivalence, we used to have one which ritually celebrated and discharged the negative component of children’s ambivalence about the world of adults: Halloween. This holiday’s origin was in a Celtic festival at the far end of summer, connected with the return of cattle from pasture and the rekindling of fires in the home.

In more modern times, on Halloween children could act out their resentment of those adults who all year long expected them to act more civilized than they wanted or were able to be. Children feel that adults always want them to be better-behaved, cleaner, and neater than feels good to them. Halloween was the one day when they could threaten adults, as they feel threatened by them all year round, and scare them, as they are scared by adults. It was the one night when they could smear windows and doors to their heart’s delight, vent their anger at having had to submit to an all too rigorous toilet training by turning over the outhouse, move fences and so do something about their feeling of being fenced in. In short, on this one night children could band together against the world of the adults, which they felt was banded together all year round in its common demands on children.

Of course, what made Halloween so significant an experience for children was that adults entered into the spirit of the occasion by acting scared, and by buying off the child’s threats by giving him goodies in response to his demand of “trick or treat.” On this one night adults had to accept the children’s urge to be “bad” or “wild”; they had to comply with the children’s demands and behave as if they felt threatened by them—a reversal of normal life. This reversal is what made Halloween so delightful to children: this grand admission by the adult world that children, too, have a right to get even—a right to act out their negative feelings. Anyone who did not enter into the spirit of the holiday and would not go along with the children’s mischievousness was a spoilsport, like those who denied Santa’s existence to the child who wanted to believe in him.

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