Pumpkin Spas against Halloween: the fight against the Western holiday has gained defense

Vampire costumes go in the trash

After 30 years of large-scale national celebrations, it has finally become clear: the night of the Catholic All Saints Day, which in the West has been turned into a “feast of the dead,” is never close to us. What kind of entertainment is this – dressing up as corpses and scaring each other when the world is already scary?! It’s like a dead holiday, because it’s of no use. But we haven’t yet, so we need our own, life-affirming holiday. And, as they say in our fairy tales, once said, it’s done. At the behest of the pike, at my will, once – and here is the Pumpkin Savior.

People still need a holiday as an intermission in busy everyday life, and for thirty years we have become accustomed to drinking on the last evening of October. And here he is – all his own, dear, born at home at the numerous requests of the working people. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, said that there is no Pumpkin Savior in the church calendar and never has been. But that’s okay: we once didn’t have Halloween either, but, once successfully “exported,” it took root so much that for the next three decades it was celebrated widely and everywhere, including kindergartens. Mothers sewed vampire costumes for their children with their own hands, and school teachers dressed up as witches at a Satanic ball. And the Church did not say a word against it. So the Pumpkin Savior should be accepted with Christian humility, if the people like it. There is an Apple Spas and a Honey Spas, and they don’t bother anyone.

And if Halloween has taken root in our country, then Pumpkin Savior will even take root, fortunately they are familiar and understandable to him. Not like Halloween, whose time has passed along with the English language, which in terms of its semantic load has become dead, as our speaker subtly noted. And you can’t argue: one word “deadline” (dead line) is worth something! And in general, why do we need a dead language if we have our own – more alive than all living ones?! How cleverly, vividly and imaginatively he replaced all these non-our fakes, cases, life hacks, deadlines and others like them with native, bright and imaginative ones! And while adults were communicating in this language, their children no longer understood Tolstoy’s hoo and why did he write “many books” like that? You just need to make sure that they at least maintain respect for Pumpkin Spas, and don’t remake it in a Western manner into some kind of Pumpkin Spas.

But, thank Tykvospas, there were still brave souls who pointed out to the crowd that the king had no clothes, and they were just copywriters – imitators of someone else’s. And their office is not an office at all, but an office, and the business is not a business, but just business. And they themselves are not managers at all, but clerks, described by the classic of Russian literature Herzen as “overwhelmed with work and having the prospect of sitting at these tables without particularly happy circumstances for twenty years and dying at them.” Even the notorious hype, which many now cannot live without, sounds much more accurately in their native language, and with a saving of those very “bukuffs”, the abundance of which now irritates us so much. They create hype there, but we have hype – both more laconic and much more figurative, because it comes from the word “to find fault.”

And since without other people’s life hacks and top charts we live even brighter and more imaginative, then without Halloween life will sparkle with new colors. Pumpkin Spas is a useful holiday, if only because pumpkin is good for the body, even if it’s just to toast a new occasion on the calendar. And it is possible that the Church will one day accept a new occasion into its fold, because, unlike the dead overseas one, this red day of the calendar is rich in all sorts of good deeds around pumpkins – craft and food fairs, pumpkin meals, etc. And our children on this day they will dress up not as ghouls, but as pumpkins, which in itself inspires some optimism. After all, in reality, we need little: a reason to gather loved ones around the table and, at least for a while, forget about the theater of the absurd into which the familiar world is turning.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29143 dated October 25, 2023

Newspaper headline:
It’s not our holiday that turned into a pumpkin