Sunday, 2 November 2014

Are Halloween costumes merely getting more tasteless, or is there something more sinister happening?

I must admit to copping out of this year's Halloween "celebrations". I went to a relative's for tea then straight out to the pub. No constant up and down to answer the door to a stream of children in ghoulish costumes. But in retrospect it is not just the Scrooge in me that produces this response. It is a genuine unease at the origin and direction of Halloween.

Halloween, "All Hallow's Eve", is the night before All Saints' Day.  This is the day when the Christian Churches, particularly the Catholic Church, commemorate and celebrate the lives of the saints, those who are in heaven,

But how over the years has this developed into an Americanised "Trick or treat-fest"? Where often unaccompanied children roam the streets begging for food or money? We now have a situation where even if adults do accompany the youngsters they are dressed in "Paedophile " uniform, a costume associated with a high profile sex-offender such as Jimmy Savile or Gary Glitter.  This glorification of  evil needs to be explained. 

By comparison the traditional Guy Fawkes celebrations are  sidelined  with safety being used as an excuse. "Fireworks can injure" But how much more danger is there in allowing unsupervised children to wander the streets knocking on strangers' doors asking for sweets or money?

The whole Halloween business is unsavory. Unsupervised children,,,,not all are in family organised groups....extort cash or goods  off people on pain of having a "trick" played on them. Over the last few years the police have issued warnings about undue pranks such as "egging" homes and cars. Some of the costumes are of inappropriate characters such as celebrity child abusers or wife beaters while the occult background of other characters is something which should not be a part of some alleged "bit of a laugh".

OK, Call me a stick-in-the-mud, no sense of humour, bible basher or whatever but I'm still more likely to go for 5th November  and not some semi-occult gathering with some very questionable undertones.

3 comments:

Halloween Gone's But He's Still Scary said...

HA...........................

SerpentSlayer said...

As you will imagine I'm not disturbed by the occult theme of Halloween, but the commercialised nature of it is sickening.
It is supposed to be a night when the dead come back to visit the living.
What does the Hebrew bogeyman, blood drinking corpses, embalmed Egyptians, frankensteins monster, superheroes, paedophiles, policemen, animals, power rangers and the rest have to do with it?
It's a money making exercise like yule and easter, all three originally served the old faith, the christians adapted them into Christianity and now the new religion of greed has fully assimilated them and others besides.

Anonymous said...

Money has taken over Halloween, like it has so many other things, and as is increasingly the norm the gullible, unthinking dross that make up a large part of the modern British population simply go along with it.