Once I thought of repudiating Hallowe'en entirely, seeing as while it may exist as a celebration that precedes All Saints Day, it is in its absence a bit of a pagan farce.

Firstly, I think the most important thing to do is to spell it correctly, Hallowe'en. There's a tendency to lose all of the good articulation marks (God help us all at the abuse of the apostrophe-s) for whatever reason, and it ought to stop. We're saying, 'hallow eve' or 'hallow even(ing).'

'Eventide' for instance means evening; so the 'even' we can reckon is an old way of saying 'the time where night approaches' Likewise the morn is the time when day approaches, its peak being noon, after which it begins to recede. Evening is not precisely after-noon, since it seems to indicate the coming of night, which is not evident until dusk. Evening is the time of night's advance, which ends at midnight.

So to be perfectly correct, hallowe'en is a colloquial saying and has little accuracy linguistically. All hallow's evening, that is, the time proceeding midnight, is actually All Saints Day liturgically. (The evening, and the morning, the first day.) Secondly, most accounts of hallowe'en in legend make more of the coming of dawn than midnight, or midnight than twilight, so as to make our modern name for the holiday vis a vis the legends and stories, quite a mess.

What is funny, though - and something I will be taking advantage of, is that liturgically (while not civilly) Hallowe'en in terms of its celebration (which is always after-dusk and usually strictly before midnight, making its name match its modern observance quite well) is All Saints Day.

Now, I have no problem that the Orthodox church does not celebrate All-Saints on November First, as I'm in no position to change such things. But it is revered still by our more Catholic countrymen, and thus so long as it is on the civil calendar, it seems like an appropriate time to celebrate any saint of your choice.

The question of mockery and masks arises here, I think, since it is obvious I would celebrate by dressing up as a saint! But not to mock them, God forbid it. But then, there is a kind of merriment that we intend which might ride the fine line between mockery - a kind of ribaldry and tomfoolery (how many great words to we have for such things?!) which tries to not take things so seriously as to find sin in a smile. It is as bad to be debauched as it is to be joyless.

And if I dress up as my patron, I am in a sense mocking myself; I am of all things a saint wannabe; the closest I can get is to put on a beard and cloak and walk around with a staff. Nobody in their right mind would confuse us!

And in truth, we all wear masks. We have appearances that mask us, like various veils, but through which more about us is known. Since for some things it is impossible to know directly on this side, we must approach from the side, behind a curtain, through the mist.

These personas we wear - office worker, driver, online commentator, blogger, critic, worshiper, musician, friend - they represent different patterns of behavior we take on, either affectively or genuinely. But since we cannot show them all at once (can you smile and frown at the same time?) There are our 'masks'. Some of them are real, a work which represents who we are, but others only represent what we want to be, or how we want others to think we are. Some of the masks don't come off.

But the characteristic of a mask is this; you can always see the eyes if you look carefully. Such is the play of masks. God help us if there are no eyes showing through.