Is it just me? I just don’t get this Halloween stuff. My grandkids would kill me. (Well that would be a real Halloweeny kind of thing to do!) They love the dressing up and of course the candy.
What got me thinking about this was on my walk today around Lake Bonavista. One of the houses had really gone to town in dressing up their lawn. Omg – they had severed limbs with blood coming out and giant rats gnawing on them…… gravestones galore and severed hands in the trees attached to handcuffs. I think that’s awful. And apparently I am not the only one to be kinda turned off this whole bloody experience…..
and this
I would just rather have the whole thing a little more kid friendly – along the lines of Casper the Friendly Ghost ….like this
I didn’t grow up (in England) with Halloween. However we did have Guy Fawkes Day which I suppose in hindsight is also pretty awful. We would take my dad’s old trousers and shirt and stuff it with newspapers, make a mask and put on a hat and throw this in a wheelbarrow and then go round the neighbourhood asking “penny for the guy”. I suppose that’s not much different from trick or treating. We would then head down to the local park where we would have fireworks, roast chestnuts and then put the poor old guy on the bonfire and burn him “alive”….. mmmm just as barbaric as Halloween.
When my kids were growing up in Swaziland, Africa, we had quite a large American community there (USAID, Embassy staff etc.). When Halloween came the parents wanted to send the kids to school dressed up. Well Mary Fraser, the principal, put her foot down firmly there. Although she came from Scotland and still had a good Scottish accent she had taught in Africa for years and was very aware of how the local Swazi people still believed in the spirit world and it was very bad luck to even talk about this sort of thing. To them this was very real and nothing to joke about.
I suppose there is a little bit of the dark side in all of us. We seem to thrive on the macabre – it’s almost like the “can’t look away from the car accident syndrome”. And who am I to talk? The Walking Dead fan who wouldn’t miss an episode.
I should “zip it”.
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