 Is it just me, or is there a distinct lack of great staple Halloween holiday movies? I mean, okay, sure. We have stuff like Hocus Pocus or the creepy cacophony of horror movies like The Exorcist or The Conjuring to watch while hiding under our blankets and stuffing our faces with candy. I mean, grapes and other healthy snacks. But what's the spooktober equivalent of a Christmas carol or it's a wonderful life? Cue the Pumpkin King. But even then it's like, this is more of a November movie, isn't it? What with it being like a smash-up betwixt Halloween and Christmas? Anyways, I'm a sucker for Tim Burton and the music of Danny Elfman, and when you combine it with Christmas cheer and Halloween gothic macabre, you basically get one of the most ambitious crossovers since I mixed my orange juice and apple juice that one time. A nightmare before Christmas isn't just a holiday favorite. It's a stop-motion masterpiece filled with spiritual lore and depth that speaks to the Vedic concepts of Dharma, self-love, and coming to terms with your highest and most authentic self. So since COVID is coming in for another way while Biden miraculously came out with a vaccine the day he was elected, let's have a mash-up of our own by mixing last month and next month's holiday into the present moment. Jump into some hidden spirituality. So before we begin, I do gotta say, this movie is a legend and it also came out in 1993. So we're going to skip the summation and jump straight to the hidden meaning. And if you haven't seen it yet, well, you're nearly 30 years late to the party, but here's your obligatory spoiler warning. Now subtly etched into the overall narrative of this film is the Indo-Tibetan concept of Dharma, the wide-ranging belief that every organism has a role to play in a well-ordered cosmos and must play that role and no other, including our duties, rights, laws, conducts, virtues, and right way of living. Over the course of the film, Jack discovers that, as wonderful a thing as Christmas is, it's not his thing. He just isn't good at it. It's not something in accordance with his natural flow, but more importantly, there's an idea that he can't give up who he really is for who he wants to be. He's comforted with the fact that he has to discover the inherent value of who he is instead of trying to be something else just because it's apparently good or better. This may be one of the most powerful truths of this movie. The fact that something is a good thing, whether it's Christmas, a loving nature, or pretty much anything else, doesn't mean that it's the only good thing. Adding to this is the idea that other things, things that strike us as scary or deeply uncomfortable, can be good things too, and this idea is even mirrored in the sets as well. One could argue that Halloween Town and its inhabitants represent the darker or shadow aspects to us, the parts of our being that are seemingly negative and oftentimes scary to us. Conversely, Christmas Town is reminiscent of all of the beneficial parts, and much like Yin and Yang, these two towns act as reflections of each other, helping to balance the world that they're in. And when these holidays interact with our world, we embrace them in their appropriate set and setting. But it's when people expect Christmas and get Halloween that things go haywire. Perhaps if each town represents our own inner natures, there's an idea we can take from this about how when our light side and dark side cross into each other, they can cause us some confusion and chaos. Yet in the end, it's through that interaction that we grow and learn, and these aspects augment their original power and balance. They learn about each other, discover ways to coexist peacefully, with each part of ourselves respecting the other, and their part to play in the whole. The challenge arises when Jack feels he's mastered Halloween Town, his current domain. It's not just boredom he's feeling. If you listen to his lament at the beginning, his sentiment echoes one that I'm sure most of us on a spiritual path have felt at some point. His rendition of, oh, somewhere deep inside of these bones and emptiness begins to grow. There's something out there far from home, a longing that I've never known, is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis' mere Christianity. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another one. What's funny about this is that Jack is basically like a king in his domain. He's got it all. He's the boss of Halloween. But all the acclaim and vindication he gets feels hollow in comparison to his inner search for meaning. Ultimately, his inner knowing that something greater is out there isn't one that material pleasure can satisfy. It's spiritual in nature, something that is seemingly echoed in his little song when he reaches Christmas Town, his own hall of a mentee where he states, and in my bones I feel a warmth that's coming from inside. This empty place inside of me is filling up. When Jack finds Christmas Town, he is fascinated with the innocence and solace of this new world and recognizes that this is what he was called to experience, something that is interestingly reminiscent of many people's first astral travel experiences. But what's so funny about this is that his first approach is to study it scientifically and lock himself away in his tower to find the Christmas feeling inside objects. Much like trying to find a feeling or aspects of consciousness within the brain though, this approach fails. It points to how the mechanistic approach to the psyche has been pretty unsuccessful to explain the phenomena that arises from brain region correlations. Jack sings, but what does it all mean as he's trying to understand an experience, not a thing, and yet ironically he's studying things trying to find meaning. In the end, he ultimately concludes that just because I cannot see it doesn't mean I can't believe it. After Santa is kidnapped, that's when things really start to go downhill, and interestingly Sally, the ragdoll woman who is totally crushing on Jack, actually has a vision that it's all gonna go down horribly wrong. But Jack is so blinded by his lust of new experiences that he completely ignores her. Wait a minute, the dichotomy between action and vision, masculine and feminine, feeling versus action, this whole divine masculine feminine duality thing is really getting easier to spot. So Sally embodies the divine feminine quite well. She's wise, understanding, loving, intuitive, and even seemingly taps into the source field to see a future outcome of things. She loves Jack even before his failed Christmas fiasco, but is largely locked away, symbolically and physically later on by Okie Boogie, and also just often goes ignored, but is a figure who ultimately is a guiding force and can see things from a higher perspective. Yep, she definitely checks all the boxes on how the divine feminine has appeared in this world. Now Jack, her counterpart who embodies the sacred masculine, and maybe a bit of the king archetypes at times, is a leader, has direction, and takes action and initiative. Maybe a bit stubborn, but he takes care of his people and his people help him follow his dreams, no matter how misguided they may be sometimes. And of course, when these two can't work together or largely just ignore one another, the natural order is upset and things descend into chaos. And I mean good proper chaos too. Worldwide panic erupts as children encounter their scary presence, and the armies of the world shoot Jack and his sleigh out of the sky. He's immortal though, so I guess it's no biggie, but very symbolically he lands in the arms of a graveyard angel. This probably signifies his own spiritual death pending rebirth, as his plans failed and he must evolve his consciousness to move forward, as soon after he finally sees his own blindness, coming to the understanding that he is meant to be the pumpkin king, and will carry out that role even better next year. After Jack's failed attempt to do Christmas himself, both towns come to appreciate their differences and the good things each holiday has to offer. Jack's attempt at Christmas were largely directed towards the symbols and visible events of the holiday, but when he got around to pursuing the real deeper meaning of it, his search was utterly clouded by his own selfishness and perspective of trying to incorporate that which he already knew. In a way, it's kind of like religious syncretism. Jack tries to practice Christmas and Halloween at the same time, and in doing so, stays true to neither, showing us the dangers of artificially trying to combine cultures and beliefs without fully understanding them both. Despite the colossal failure of his endeavors, though, Jack still sees the value in having experienced everything, and regrets nothing. He learns the lessons, instead of feeling sorry for himself and dwelling in self-hatred. He is happy he tried to put himself out there and just goes into making things right, even after his mistake, seemingly coming more into alignment with his true self in the process, and eventually finds a renewed love of his role. It's also interesting that our hero is not only flawed, but comes from the seemingly dark side of things. Even though we all love Jack, he is kind of an evil lord type, and yet this approach serves to humanize him and his town, and what they represent, allowing us to understand where the darker characters and attributes are coming from, and see the light and goodness in them as well. It teaches us that darkness also has value in this world, and those who are born playing those darker roles in life are actually fulfilling their role in this life on earth. The Halloween town people are all pretty supportive of each other, they're caring and collaborative, not traits you usually associate with monsters and demons. And then maybe there's a lesson here too that even the darker aspects of ourselves can still ultimately come from a place of love if we acknowledge their purpose and role in our experience. After Oogie is unraveled like a ball of yarn, Santa sets off to make things right, but leaves the residence of Halloween town with a parting gift, making it snow, allowing all of the residents of Halloween town to experience that same joy that Jack felt when experiencing Christmas for the first time, which in a way actually fulfills Jack's original dream of truly understanding Christmas. Now I'm sure there's a part of this that speaks to experiencing things to truly understand them, rather than just being told about them by someone else. As he flies away, Santa yells, Happy Halloween! And Jack replies by shouting, Merry Christmas! Which is pretty funny, but also serves to show that each side has become more balanced and acknowledges the role that each other plays in their world. All in all, A Nightmare Before Christmas doesn't really fit as a Christmas movie in the conventional sense, but it doesn't quite fit as a Halloween one either, which is really what makes it so great. It's a part of both seasons and is itself a very balanced movie, which is so meta I love it. Perhaps what is the most curious lesson in the whole thing is that Jack makes the mistake of thinking that his calling lies somewhere else, rather than where he already is. Yet the longing within him for something more compelled him into his search in the first place and into the discovery of something new. Even though it wasn't meant for him to give, it was meant for him to receive. Though his intentions are good, he misses this critical point and nearly ruins himself and the holiday he has come to love. Yet through his failure, he realizes who he is from a different perspective. Perhaps there's an idea here that sometimes we have to fail in order to discover who we really are, and chances are we often come back stronger and more in alignment with our goals every time we fail. After all, what is failure but an opportunity to begin again, only wiser? So until next time, it still kind of feels like October I guess, but then again, this year has really blended into one long continuous stream at this point, hasn't it? So happy holidays for whatever season you're in when you end up watching this video. Toodles!