Seems to me the yard (garden in Britain) decorations have become more elaborate lately.
I’m confused about some reasoning that is floating around: households and communities that have decided to send the kids around begging for sealed packages of HFCS and sugar on Saturday night, or perhaps Monday evening (often before dark).
I presume they still do call this ritual event, termed by some a holiday…Halloween. Just what do they think this word means? It’s a PAGAN ritual, modified, of course, over time, but a PAGAN ritual. So they’re are having their wee innocents do this pagan dress-up begging, but changing the date, to honor the lordz day?
I’m head-shaking confused.
Surely, this is a teeeee(d-off) parteeeee move-ment?
29 October 2010 at 9:56 pm
kayak woman says:
The candy begging still happens on the date here and I actually have a big bag of HFCS hanging around waiting for it.
I dunno. I’m puzzled about Halloween too but I think for slightly different reasons. I think that for a lot of folks, it’s just a fun holiday and maybe doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning beyond that. On a somewhat opposite end of the spectrum, we have a fair number of fundies (or whatever they are) around here who lock the doors and turn out the lights and keep their kids out of school the day of the Halloween parade.
I do agree that Halloween decorations are starting to equal or even surpass Christmas decorations. And then there was the year that I didn’t buy HFCS until October 31st and when I went to Kroger to get it, they had removed it from the shelves, dumped it all into shopping carts, and were putting out identical pieces of HFCS wrapped in red and green and silver instead of orange and purple and black. Go figger!
How’s that for a long, rambly comment? 🙂
30 October 2010 at 8:59 am
pooh says:
All Hallowed Day –> All Saints Day = November 1st
All Hallowed Eve –> Halloween = October 31st
It’s not a totally pagan holy-day or holy-evening, but like many of the Christian holidays, it assimilates parts of the pre-existing rites and festivals.
(Resistance is Futile, you will be Assimilated… to further mix metaphors and costume ideas.)
31 October 2010 at 10:41 pm
Leslie says:
Bill Maher said this past weekend that Tea Partiers should not be permitted to do trick-or-treat. His logic was perfect. Ha!
Btw, in San Diego, the begging is tonight (10/31), after dark, with no specific start/stop times. It’s about the only thing not fully regulated, permitted, and requiring full body armor for children in this city.
1 November 2010 at 7:33 am
kayak woman says:
Revisiting this entry after the holiday. It occurs to me that, the Planet Ann Arbor would have a good time trying to regulate when trick-or-treating happens given that it does not have a daily newspaper any more.