Y’all didn’t think we forgot about Halloween did you?
As it turns out, we had big plans for this week’s post. The best plans. For months we’ve been trying to coordinate a shoot with our two OG MyXXFLY babes Linda and Ophelia to bring you triple the flyness. Finally having found a day that worked for everyone
involved, with a week’s worth of planning, we were all amped. While Ophelia and I were at my crib rounding up our costumes for the Rocky Horror themed shoot (no relation to the remake, we swear), Linda went to pump some gas before driving over to meet us. Then? The tyrannical forces of misfortune struck. To make a long story short, one tangled hose, cement block, and smashed toe later, our dear Linda rushed to the nearest emergency room to mend her freshly dislocated toe. Our photographer Frank? Has been having sitcom parody dreams of dislocated toes ever since.
So with no back-up in place, we scrapped the original idea, made Ophelia up as the human form of sea goddess Calypso in record time, found an old wooden fence that would match the aesthetic of her costume, and caught the last 20 minutes of the day’s sunlight before visiting Linda at the E.R. Never a dull moment at MyXXFLY HQ.
In Pirates of the Caribbean lore, water deity Calypso was bound into a human body by a group of pirates with the help of her scorned former lover, Davey Jones. Her human form, Tia Dalma, is an Obeah sorceress who has powers of divination and over the course of the films proves to be more powerful than anyone imagined; she is in reality a mythological goddess after all. She is an untamed, seductive, and her nature is volatile. Though it seems she still loves Jones, when released from her flesh prison, he falls into the abyss of a storm created in her fury against those responsible for binding her. Her character was a perfect fit for our girl Ophelia who is a free and dangerous woman with Caribbean blood and a gift of intuition worthy of any goddess.
The way that Americans celebrate Halloween in the 21st century is a long cry from the origins of the Holiday which was has roots in the ancient festival of Samhain (Sow-in). A Celtic celebration that preceded the beginning of their new year on November 1st.
The Roots
The coming of winter is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind in sunny South Florida, where sweater weather equates to cool temperatures in the 60’s and 70’s Fahrenheit.
I hear y’all with real winters, you hate me. Bro, if I can’t rub the only nice weather we have all year in your faces, what else is the point of living in Florida?
Even now, from the comfort of heated homes in the first world, the consensus is that harsh winters fucking suck. A couple of years ago I spent one week of winter in Pittsburgh. As I lay under a heated blanket, with a space warmer at my feet in an embrace with Frank, that was zero parts romantic, and 100% a reciprocal need for body warmth to fend off hypothermia; I thought of that cabin in The Thing and felt the skeletal hands of death luring me toward the underworld. After one week. Then later, as I watched Pitbull’s rocking New Year’s Eve party from The Fontainebleau or wherever the fuck, after 27 years, I understood why people with real winter fucking hate Florida.
Now, hold on to that dread, strip away the conveniences of modern living, and picture the Celts, in what is now Ireland and the UK, over the span of an entire season, 2,000 years ago.
So naturally, they wore masks and animal heads so roaming ghosts wouldn’t recognize them as human. Bonfires were lit, and bowls of food were left outside homes to appease spirits. Why? Because impending winter was super saiyan levels of crazy. It was believed that on October 31st the boundary between the worlds of the living and dead are blurred, but mostly, the godawful fucking winter is nigh.
Controversy
Over the course of thousands of years and reinventions later, the experience of immigrants and the hand of religion have left us with a distinct Halloween experience. Kids in the United States dress as superheroes and heroines while adults dress as increasingly questionable shit. Those bowls of food? Well they’ve morphed into candy of course, and we’re left with a Holiday that boasts one quarter of all the candy sold in the U.S. yearly.
Ever since I was a child, the process of choosing a costume on Halloween was always an opportunity to tap into some part of my personality. Through grade school I dressed as witches, gypsies, and Native Americans, power rangers and a 3rd grade Selena Quintanilla. What costumes people choose nowadays are rife with politicism, and with every approaching Halloween you can expect critique when people reduce cultures into costumes.
Growing up as a first generation Nica in Miami, the concept of Halloween was foreign to my parents who were more accustomed to celebrating Dia de todos los Santos or Dia de los Fieles Difuntos on the first and second of November respectively. To this day, my dad calls Halloween, El Dia de las Brujas or “Day of the Witches”. All Saints Day, and the Day of the Dead are as different throughout the Christian world as Halloween is from them. These days are less about candy and winter, and more about paying respects to the deceased. Every country, and every town therein adopts its own customs and traditions. Ultimately, we’re left with an experience as personal as the rest of our lives. One that is shaped by the relationships and culture and generation we grew up in.
The Takeaway?
Late October is historically a time where strange happenings and superstitious buffoonery rules. For Linda’s sake, I wish we were just recanting some make believe saga, but our ordeal in bringing you this post is a pretty fitting story for Halloween: it can start off with the best of intentions and turn into a whole other monster in the blink of an eye. Halloween is a deeply polarizing holiday, from its origins as a pagan end of harvest festival to the modern controversy of costumes becoming part of the bigger picture of racism and marginalization in America.
For me? I’m just a sucker for nostalgia.
The pieces Ophelia is donning today have been combined into countless outfits and costumes over the course of at least a decade and in a pinch, came to the rescue so we could bring you something dope this week. With the end of the year approaching I feel it’s super important to reiterate that we can celebrate (or abstain from) holidays without spending recklessly or being insensitive to others. Even the most well-intentioned costumes can be offensive when we reduce marginalized groups into stereotypes, jokes, or fetishes, and we’re more clever than that aren’t we? Then again, if you’re a dick every day of the year, you’ll probably be a dick on Halloween.
So what about my childhood outfits? A girl named after a Romani woman with Native American heritage who thought she was paying homage to parts of her own perceived identity through costume? You tell me. We want to thank Linda and Ophelia for being a part of our Halloween post, and we hope the universe will smile upon our triples shoot next time. Until then, tell us how you feel about Halloween on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and keep your spooky extra extra fly.
