It’s a celebration of death.
Nowadays it’s an escape from reality a chance to let your imagination go but for the days in the past it was a frightened populace fighting off the grasp from an invisible world.
Only four more days left to get your Silver Shamrock masks.
There are “haunted house” festivals and attractions all over central PA, and countless private residences sporting hundreds of dollars’ worth of yard decoration. Twelve-foot high skeletons, colossal witches and Frankensteins, etc. Cobwebs, ghosts, pumpkins, zombies, things with red-light eyes, tombstones, inflatables, ad nauseam.
All I ever keep outside is a mailbox and a batch of security cameras.
I grew up in small town America — suburban white pickett fences, gaurding small, perfect lawns.
In those times, children went door-to-door and got free candy tossed into shopping bags. Parents ended those days by panicking over reports (many groundless) of needles and razors in apples, and other tampered treats. Long before that, the “tricks” aspect had been eliminated and declared as vandalism.
Then Halloween was re-cast for “safety”into costume party competitions at school gyms, and street level trick-or-treating was effectively ended.
Finally, Halloween became about adult fantaies and costumes that would have gotton their wearers arrested in earlier times became the centerpiece, along with parties for adults to booze it up and flaunt.
Hallloween was easily re-purposed by Satan over a few decades by playing on fear and sex. He’s good at that... ...and very patient.
It started in Ireland not the US
Here in Los Angels the so called adults go even more crazy on Halloween they celebrate it greater than Christmas parades and huge parties always dressing up to hide what they are.
November 1st is All saints day.
That makes October 31 All hallows evening.
Take it from there.
Halloween has become another excuse to drink to excess and for young women to dress as a Slutty_______________(insert your favorite person, place or thing here) and for young me to drink to excess and act slightly more stupid than they do in daily life.
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No, it started centuries before Samhain did.
Samhain was a harvest festival that occurred on different dates... it was rarely if ever associated with October 31. We only know about it because some Christian writer mentioned it in another context.
All Hollows Eve before All Saints Day was a thing elsewhere in Europe long before the Irish ever gave it a thought. Obviously Samhain wasn’t celebrated in non Celtic Europe even though All Hollows Eve and All Saints Day was.
Only after Wicca got rolling in the 1980s did Samhain get associated with All Hollows Eve.
When I was growing up, at a time when California was still a red state, Halloween was strictly a kid’s holiday. When we outgrew trick-or-treating, we would do things to scare trick-or-treaters such as setting up contraptions that would make it look as though ghosts were flying around our house.
Today, only Christmas is a bigger commercial holiday.
Don’t care for Halloween. But I like the discounted candy the day after at DG.
Don’t care for Halloween. But I like the discounted candy the day after at DG.
When I was a kid eons ago, Halloween was a lot different. Most costumes were homemade, but there were cheap costumes that fell apart after one night. Most of the houses that had a lit pumpkin on the steps were the ones that opened their doors and gave you coins, or a candy bar, or maybe a candied apple on a stick. There weren’t many decorations, not like today, but some homemade witches and other objects scattered here and there.
BTTT
Another example how US culture is poisoning the rest of the world.
Since after the year 2000, (thanks to George Dubya Bush) to the present, there has been a nonstop influx of Hispanics to where now it is probably pushing well over 90% Hispanic. The change in the neighborhood is very noticable with regard to how many homes are elaborately decorated for Halloween as compared to pre influx, and the decorations aren’t the whimsical type that I was accustomed to in the old days, they are more dark and sinister in nature.
What is odd though is there doesn’t seem to be the same enthusiasm to decorate when Christmas time rolls around. More into Santa Muerte than Santa Clause I guess.
We don’t do halloween. We decorate for fall and Thanksgiving - no spooky stuff.