Monday 29 October 2012

Halloowweenn, and my failings as a human.

I always enjoy getting carried away with my spelling of Halloween. It looks far more interesting with all the double letters!



Right then. Yes. Halloween.Oh and please forgive the text heavy nature of this post...!

I'm sure you can tell by the title that Halloween does not in fact make it as my favourite of dates. I can't even call it a holiday or a festival can I?

It is one evening where a lot people feel it is obligatory to dress up as a zombie/pirate/fairy/animal etc or god forbid a sexy-blah blah blah. Children demand sweets and if you don't give them anything, either throw an egg at your car, or do nothing at all. I'm never sure which I find more disappointing.


(I feel a little bad using these pictures, but they personify the"sexy- whatever" style of Halloween that I so detest.)

I just think it is so futile.

Perhaps my Scrooge-like attitude comes from never having done anything much at all for Halloween until I was at uni. By this point in my life I was so completely devoid of self confidence that I loathed the thought of dressing up and looking like an idiot, drawing attention to my self. Yes, yes, I know it doesn't matter at all when your in a group of 10-30 people or so and you all look like idiots, in a uni town like Bournemouth, where lets face it, most of the population dresses up every weekend and looks like an idiot anyway. I did it. I went out. And spent the entire night craving normal clothes and sanity.

It's strange though, looking back now (with a totally different outlook on life, mostly confident in my self) I can't decide what it was that I hated so much. It was probably an equal combination of crap costumes: they were all without fail half arsed (and I felt like the fat, ugly one. A ridiculous self imagine I'm still trying to drum out of my head.) The places we went; awful bars with terrible music and revolting sluts and leering old men (generalising a little bit here by the way.) And the whole attitude of "come on lets go get drunk". Don't get me wrong, I enjoy drinking, I just don't like drinking at the pace set by someone else in a mad dash to forget that everyone looks like an idiot.

The above two paragraphs explain the second part of the title of this post. I suspect that in the eyes of a vast number of the population (especially those under 25) this makes me less than human. Even some of my closest friend will be disowning me about now.

On the other hand I miss the things that we used to do as a family for Halloween. Mostly this consisted of carving pumpkins, and lighting them up and pointing them out of the kitchen window at the church opposite, because the church warden at the time was in fear of all things pagan (he banned Halloween at the CofE primary school we went to in the village...that in fear!) My mum was great. I reckon she brought us up right - taunting the clergy.


I'd like to bring back Halloween properly.  No more ridiculous costumes. Polyester should be banned at this time of year. No sexy anything. Halloween is not an excuse to get genital herpes and chlamydia. It doesn't matter whether you choose to believe in the Christian side of the 'festival' or the pagan, or a mash up of the two, whether you want to make it a harvest festival, or the precursor to honouring the saints on 1st & 2nd of November, or if you want to have a Samhain summers' end festival. It does not matter so long as some sort of sense and reason is restored!

By that I don't mean that it should be some sort of demure event like a 15th Century puritan Christmas. It should be a raucous and shambolic, lively and exciting evening.

Check out this post. This is How I think fancy dress should be carried out. Brilliant costumes, well done.

And this. Bristol's Zombie Walk a couple of days ago. I was at work and didn't get to see it, but this link shows what I imagine to be some of the best!

Common, let's stop bringing sexy back, and bring epic back instead!


All images are © Chloe Cooter 2012 unless image links to another website. All images that are not © Chloe Cooter will be linked to the source (if possible) and credited in that way.

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