Halloween is For Summer’s End No Matter How We Celebrate It

 

 

Halloween was originally the Celtic New Year’s Festival which marked the close of the harvest season and the coming of winter. It has become a worldwide celebration day, although it is still in North America that Halloween has the largest aficionados of ghoulish costumes and decorations.  

As I was reading about the origins of Halloween, I found the following detail on the World History Encyclopedia page (https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1456/history-of-halloween/):

“It seems that the observance included stocking up supplies for the winter, slaughtering cattle, and disposing of the bones in "bone fires" which, in time, came to be known as bonfires.”

And that triggered for me the idea of making Halloween figurines, a bit ghoulish perhaps; using elk bones I had collected in my outings in Arizona’s High Desert.

… After a few trials of bone combinations, I settled on using elk vertebrae - primarily thoracic and lumbar ones.

Here is the simplest combination of three vertebrae. First the profile

 

And then the front

 

Using the above combination here is the first figurine. I placed a jackrabbit tail on its “head” to give it a more outdoorsman-like character.

 

The front view is more germane to the Halloween tradition:

 

The second figurine does not have its head covered with a tail but does have jackrabbit feet.

The front view makes it look like a hammer shark with squirrel hands and jackrabbit feet!

 But the most fun I had was with a lumbar vertebrum. First, I thought it looked like a cat’s face 

But depending on the angle of view it acquired a pensive attitude

Or it reminded me of a traditional Chinese warrior!

 

Maybe it does not matter – on Halloween all appearances are allowed and celebrated.

 

PS/ In case the anthropomorphism of seeing a human/mamaliam face on an elk's vertebrum is not obvious, here is what I saw

I painted the "upper lip" to identify the nostrils and the facial contour.

October 29, 2022

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022