Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Hallowe'en

A particularly happy Hallowe'en to the evil swine who nicked my husband's carefully carved pumpkin from our doorstep before I had even had the chance to take a photograph of his handiwork. He has been consoling himself this evening by looking at its doppelganger

Otherwise it's been great fun. I do love Hallowe'en even though I know it's all over commercialised and American. I can't abide Trick or Treat - it's a dreadful, rude, disrespectful custom, but I do allow my daughter to do a bit of supervised guising. She and 9 of her friends went out en masse and they all took singing their song very seriously.

I do have to thank our friends from across the Atlantic for giving us a much more user friendly vegetable to carve. I remember the olden days when it used to be a turnip. You had to have one hell of a work ethic to scoop them out. One SNP minded friend of mine wanted his children to have turnips rather than pumpkins but demurred when his wife suggested that he be the one to actually transform this rock hard vegetable into a work of art.

Many thanks to Anne and Stevie for hosting such an imaginative party tonight. They both looked great in their costumes and had transformed their house into a perfect habitat for all types of ghoulish creature. Anne is a zillion times more fastidious than I am in the house cleaning department so it was great to point out the cobwebs and spiders in her house, even if they were fake. I particularly loved the "find the sweet in the green worms game."

2 comments:

Tristan said...

Trick-or-treating is fine if its done sensibly. Its the idiots who use it as an excuse to cause trouble who spoil it.

I really think we have a lack of community institutions when it comes to it though. In the US people just signal whether they want trick-or-treaters by having the porch light on or off.

This year we put jack-o-lanterns in our window to signal that we're happy to have trick or treaters and they were all very nice and polite (not to mention very cute in the case of a little pumpkin).

The causing damage aspect seems to be rather British, along the lines of Molly Dancing in East Anglia where on Plough Monday they'd threated to plough up your garden if you didn't give them money... (a practice which along with the annual fight in Market Square means that Molly Dancing is still technically illegal in Cambridge - although it is not observed and dancers collect for charity and fun all year round without threatening people)

Unknown said...

It's not the concept of going round the doors dressed up and getting bags of sweets that I object to. I just want to call it guising rather than trick or treat. To me the whole concept of saying trick or treat to someone is rude and disrespectful.

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