Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Saturday 31 October 2015

Change and Decay (mutandis, mutandis...)

The French have recently imported Hallowe'en
straight from the ritual-corrupting USA,
as a kind of harvest festival
with childish masks and silly, highly-flammable costumes,
unaware that it was once known
also as All Hallows' or All Souls' Eve,
a pre-Christian festival of the dead
moved a few hours to All Souls' Day
by the Catholic Church, and,
interestingly, moved six days forward
to Guy Fawkes' Night only by the English,
together with the apotropaic bonfires which were the centre
of the 'Celtic' rite, not the grinning lanterns carved out from
turnips/rutabagas/swedes - and now from pumpkins
no longer carried through the muddy lanes
by joyful, barefoot bumpkins.

3 comments:

Marcus Billson said...

Would it be a fair assumption that you won't be giving out candy to the Trick-or-Treating children coming by your door in their Halloween costumes? It is appalling to us also in the US how hungrily the world slurps up everything American, except the Muslim world, of course, and even they want to live here.

Wofl said...

I don't know where the ghastly, pushy "trick or treat" came from. Not from Ireland or Scotland, that's for sure. Some kids have tried it in France and got a frosty reception, not just from me, who would be prepared and willing to hand out apples, pears or quinces to charming children. (Candy, of course, is poison. Might as well give them henbane. Hmm. that's an idea: henbane and absinthe in little lozenges...)

Marcus Billson said...

You'd be in jail before you knew what happened. Candy has to be wrapped and factory sealed to be given out from someone's door, and fruit is no longer allowable in the US since too many razor blades kept appearing in Trick-or-Treat apples. My wife and I went out to dinner to be away from home since we had just returned to California only to find children still on the street when we returned after 9:00 p.m. (their parents were with them) and we had to skulk in the door, keep the lights off, and retire to a distant bedroom. But I have to admit Trick-or-Treating was marvelous fun when I was a child.