Halloween

I don’t get Halloween. What’s it for exactly? I mean, I get that it’s supposed to have some kind of supernatural angle to it; maybe it was once considered in a serious light and thought of as a night on which the ghosts and spirits rose up to taunt people. But, I mean, we all know that that’s not going to happen now, right? So what’s it for?

Maybe it’s me, but all the holidays and traditions (in the Western world at least) have just become so commercialised and merchandised that it seems that that is now their only purpose. Christmas is almost as bad, but at least that does have a deeper significance for some people than just dressing up in stupid costumes and eating too much. (I’m not actually a huge fan of Christmas, as regular readers of this blog might have seen, but I can at least accept that there was a legitimate reason for having it before the shops starting marketing the hell out of their products in preparation for it.) But things like Halloween really stump me – Valentine’s day, Pancake day (if you’re British you will know what this is and if you’re not you won’t – so I’ll leave you to wonder :-)). Bonfire night in particular (another British one) makes almost no sense to me. Sometimes I think we just create these days as an excuse to behave stupidly and give ourselves a day off from being serious. And, ok, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But I still don’t like Halloween.

*Puts on grumpy old killjoy voice* Ahem . . .

Let me tell you why that is:

Firstly, stupid costumes that obscure the appearance of ordinary people so that they look like monsters are not fun, especially when said people go walking around in dark streets, banging on doors and scaring the living sh** out of jumpy, anxious, quiet-living people. I was never allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid and I came from one of those families where it was completely acceptable and even prudent to turn off all the lights, lock all the doors and pretend to be out of the house whenever the kids came round clamouring for sweets.

Halloween is a scary time for me, largely because it’s so noisy and so full of boisterous people who refuse to behave like orderly, civilized human beings. I don’t understand the impulse there. We spend all the other days of the year positively demanding that people behave in a calm, orderly manner; if people ran wild in the streets like that on any other night they would be considered as causing a public disturbance. So why, on this night, is it suddenly allowable, forgivable and even, in some people’s estimation, fun, to do just that?

I realize that, by now, I am sounding very much like a killjoy, and I don’t begrudge people a good time – really, I don’t. But why does it always have to involve so much public uproar? Why can’t people have fun in a nice quiet way and leave the rest of us to do the same?

I don’t know what it’s like in America, although I’ve seen all the stuff on TV about mass trick-or-treating expeditions around suburban neighbourhoods and people making jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. How accurate this is I do not know. But we’ve kind of picked up on it here, despite the fact that it doesn’t really go with our usually staid and reserved style of living. . . .

Incidentally, what is it with American people and pumpkins? I’ve never eaten pumpkin, but it seems to me that they feature in quite a lot of end of year festivities over there – pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and all that. Honestly, why pumpkins?

. . .

Well, anyway, whatever it is we’re trying to emulate from the American traditions, we have adopted Halloween quite seriously and taken it to our hearts. And it’s loud and it’s disruptive and I don’t like it. Sorry America! :-/ I think it’s worse in this country because not only do we have Halloween at the end of October, but the disruption tends to continue after that because we also have a little thing called Bonfire Night (mentioned above) right at the beginning of November.

I should probably explain this – although I wasn’t going to – because not everyone around the world will know what this is; it’s a very British thing and it remains a mystery even to some of us. People question the sense of it every year, and yet we still do it. It’s just as noisy and disruptive as Halloween but it has a completely different origin.

The historians amongst you might know who Guy Fawkes was, but, for those of you who don’t, I will enlighten you. He led a little revolutionary group at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the purpose of which was to blow up the Houses of Parliament using a shed load of gunpowder. The intention of this was to murder King James I of England and the rest of his government, although his reasoning is probably too complicated and boring to go into right now.

The upshot, anyway, is that Fawkes was unsuccessful, but his memory – as a potential assassin of the King – has lived on for the last 400 years and it is now a tradition in this country, every year on the 5th of November, to light bonfires in public places and burn effigies of this man while eating hot dogs and other barbecue style food and setting off fireworks – presumably to commemorate the whole gunpowder plot thing.

Most people don’t consider the origins of this day any more, since it’s just considered to be fun to light fires and set off noisy sky rockets that make pretty patterns in the sky. But, like I said, this is just more noise and disruption and, being so close to Halloween, it sort of gives people in this country a licence to spend almost the whole week in between behaving like hooligans. Bonfire Night is probably worse than Halloween I think; they actually have to issue warnings every year to tell people how to handle fireworks safely because it is, traditionally, one of the busiest nights for all the hospitals in Britain. They invariably have to treat people for burns and other injuries and, occasionally, people die. (NB. I’m really not making this up!)

Suffice it to say then, it baffles me that we still have these holidays and traditions when all it really does for anyone is cause mayhem and get people injured. I’d rather stay indoors – but then I suppose I am very boring that way – but seriously, who invents these things, and what the hell are they thinking when they do?

In my nightmare vision of the future every day has been turned into some kind of commercial holiday or otherwise stupid commemoration day. That will soon be all we do – it could be a revolution of sorts, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it? Nevertheless, I would like to scrap Halloween. Who’s with me?

No?

Oh well . . .