Halloween Rising

[poliphilo]

Give it a few more years and I predict Halloween will be an official holiday in the UK.  It has already elbowed Bonfire Night aside, and must be running neck and neck with Easter in the competition to become our second most popular feast- after Christmas. The churches won't like it, of course, but the churches carry less and less weight in the national discourse. 

TV coverage this year included a remarkably friendly report from a blasted heath somewhere in Leicestershire where a group of druids (but they looked more like bog-standard pagans to me) were running a circle in the wind and the rain- and drinking mead from a horn. Druidry achieved charitable status as a bona fide religion a few weeks back- which is another straw in the wind.

Slowly, but by measurable increments, Britain is becoming a pagan country. I don't mean that vast numbers are going to be joining covens or groves,  but that a distinctly pagan frame of mind- impatient with religious dogma, hedonistic, secular but superstitious, keen on Nature- is becoming the national norm. Most people still think druids and witches are a bit weird and extreme- what with all that dressing-up and stuff-  but- like the TV reporter in Leicestershire- they're coming to find themselves more and more in sympathy, less and less spooked. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I like it. I loved going trick-or-treating as a child and I love the children coming 'round to my place now. I love carving pumpkins and decorating.

Every year I figure that the fear of kiddie diddlers or the machinations of God botherers has finally killed the holiday and every year I still get a few kids coming by, sometimes more, sometimes less, but they still come. Sunday night, one of our first customers was a girl up the street, with her two youngins, that I distinctly remember knocking on our door when she was just a child.

Halloween, in some small way, helps draw our neighborhood together and, in an age when so many forces are pulling us apart and isolating us, that has to be a good thing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Trick or Treating is embedded in your society. It has rules- which everyone accepts. Over here it's a new phenomenon- something we've copied from your TV shows and movies- and it's a bit lawless. A few years back- before the Muslims moved in and tamed the area- we were getting gangs of tough youths banging on the door demanding protection money. It wasn't at all pleasant.