Walking Ghost Night as Celebration (Essay Sample)

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Anthropology: Folklore Final Exam
Due to the high diversity of our university, I believe “Walking Ghost Night” will be the most suitable celebration to become our signature campus event once we are back to face-to-face learning. For “Walking Ghost Night”, we shall be celebrating it in the last day of October every year, a day when people all over the world celebrate Halloween. During the evening festivities, we shall celebrate our deceased friends, family members and loved ones with bonfires and feasts. Festivals play certain key functions in the lives of people. For instance, “Walking Ghost Night” will provide us with a sense of belonging, enable our social bonds to become stronger, give meaning to our lives by emphasizing on certain ideals and also relieving us emotionally. By celebrating “Walking Ghost Night” each year, we shall demonstrate and maintain the established order of our school life and use the day to pass a strong message of unity which will eventually initiate and sustain social change. For instance, African-Americans celebrate Kwanzaa (Flores-Peña et al., 283). In that particular festival they use the festival as a way of expressing their culture, ideals and the life that they expect other people to respect. In the same way, celebrating Halloween in our campus will be a way of expressing ourselves to the leadership of the institution and the rest of the world.
One main major activity that shall characterize our “Walking Ghost Night” celebrations is that we shall decorate our campus with artifacts that relate to the ghosts and haunted places. For instance, since people have traditionally be using pumpkins, ears of corn, squash and other fruits and vegetables to represent harvest for their night of Halloween, we shall do the same in our campus so that we do not deviate much from the real traditions of that night. Ust as it happens in Halloween, these artifacts will be joined together by weird dummies as well as scare-crow figures which are hanged on trees or standing on porches (Santino, 3). Every last day of October, we seen people’s homes with scare-crow like figures and most of them are made from plant materials. During our “Walking Ghost Night” festivity at school, we will make sure that we stick to these ghoulish creatures crafted from wood, rags and cloth and made into skeletons and witches, which are all characteristic of a Halloween festival (Brandes, 369). It seems that such figures are used all over America and traverse ethnic cultures. For instance, New Orleans, North Carolina, Pittsburg and other areas tend to use such figures as lampposts transformed into scare-crows with a pumpkin head. In essence, we shall indeed decorate our campus with such figures in order to establish the real mood of Halloween.
Another major activity that we shall take part during the festivity is decorating ourselves. It is a matter of fact that people put on special costumes for the “Walking Ghost Night”. During our festivities at campus, we shall also provide costumes for everyone who wants to put them on that day. We shall make sure that companies come out in large numbers to sponsor the festivity by buying us costumes and in turn getting an opportunity to market themselves in the student population. We shall divide ourselves into groups whereby people will come together and choose a certain style of dressing. However, such dressing must be in Halloween costume because we are all inspired by the Halloween culture to celebrate our own version of it dubbed “Walking Ghost Night”. Santino states that for their Halloween, sometimes people may dress in groups whereby some form a face, others a nose, others the eyes and others the ears (Santino, 3). Such a formation is still applicable to our case, but we shall allow for diverse styles and ideas from our student population.
Several symbolic behaviors and rituals will characterize our “Walking Ghost Night” festival. For example, we shall have decorated breads, plastic toys, and paper cutouts most of which will play humorously on the theme of death. Just as it happens in a typical Hallowen, people will carry sculptured sugar candies crafted into caskets, skulls, and skeletons which suggest a macabre confrontation with the idea of death (Brandes, 360). Nevertheless, sinc