Stuff your pumpkins
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanOh yes. It’s Halloween tonight, isn’t it?
The BBC website has an article with the picturesque and accurate title “The Japanese Knotweed of Festivals” and they’re right.
The Scots have some tradition of celebrating Halloween with “Guising” whereby kids dress up and entertain people in return for gifts. As far as I am aware, most of England and Wales didn’t have such a thing until the mid 80s. At least it didn’t happen in our part of the world. Even when I was at college in the late 70s and early 80s, if you popped into the pub on Halloween, there might be a plastic bat hanging from the bar and that would be it.
Simply put, no matter how many kids wander around tonight ‘trick or treating’, it’s a recent import. And even any charm that bit might have had has largely been superseded by the sight of gangs of thuggish youths effectively demanding money with menaces.
I blame Steven Spielberg. Pretty much no-one knew about ‘Trick or Treat’ in England before ET the Extraterrestrial. That made people notice and then as the BBC points out, increasingly from the mid 80s onwards, the boom in satellite TV and day time terrestrial TV, meant that more and more US kids’ shows found their way into people’s homes and that meant more awareness of Halloween.
I’ll be staying away from the back door tonight and the lights will be off; a night’s TV or music or just about anything is called for.
What’s the Halloween version of “Bah, Humbug”?
The BBC website has an article with the picturesque and accurate title “The Japanese Knotweed of Festivals” and they’re right.
The Scots have some tradition of celebrating Halloween with “Guising” whereby kids dress up and entertain people in return for gifts. As far as I am aware, most of England and Wales didn’t have such a thing until the mid 80s. At least it didn’t happen in our part of the world. Even when I was at college in the late 70s and early 80s, if you popped into the pub on Halloween, there might be a plastic bat hanging from the bar and that would be it.
Simply put, no matter how many kids wander around tonight ‘trick or treating’, it’s a recent import. And even any charm that bit might have had has largely been superseded by the sight of gangs of thuggish youths effectively demanding money with menaces.
I blame Steven Spielberg. Pretty much no-one knew about ‘Trick or Treat’ in England before ET the Extraterrestrial. That made people notice and then as the BBC points out, increasingly from the mid 80s onwards, the boom in satellite TV and day time terrestrial TV, meant that more and more US kids’ shows found their way into people’s homes and that meant more awareness of Halloween.
I’ll be staying away from the back door tonight and the lights will be off; a night’s TV or music or just about anything is called for.
What’s the Halloween version of “Bah, Humbug”?