TW...to think celebrating Halloween and horror is outrageous

I listened (by accident, it was just on in the kitchen) to the Sunday morning service on R4 last sunday, the while thing was basically halloween and fascinating! OP please have a listen. Think it was 8am, radio 4.
(committed atheist here, no agenda to push, just interesting)

I can only do the twee Halloween harvest stuff, I struggle massively with the horror element of recent years.

I also roll my eyes when people in the UK start celebrating festivals which come from other places in the world. I read about a Day of the Dead event - was it in London? But that's what they do in South America! Leave it to them - honestly, can't anyone have their own traditions any more without us aping them?

The UK in general but London especially is something of a "melting pot" of cultures. Filled with people from all over the world who bring their traditions and customs over. They will hold their usual events still but often don't feel the need to be exclusionary and close them off to "others". Indeed they often like to share them

Like Diwali or Vashaki events being open "family" events beyond just those of the faith

I’ve often found it tricky to explain WHY I love horror so much but this nails it perfectly !

There's a whole genre of horror focussed around people making great art that deals with their own fears and universal ones so I object to your outright dismissal of that too. Death is something we all have to reckon with, if people do that playfully on Halloween it's not somehow a slap in the face to people in Gaza or anywhere else. Humour, jokes, play are a way that people can approach the huge truths of life and death that we can't change. It happens in many cultures.

Yes - I think you're right. Death used to be so much more 'high profile' in the past for obvious reasons, and most of us now live in a very sheltered bubble where such hard realities are largely suppressed. For example, I hate looking at skeletons - I'd hate to see my own x-ray! I have a horror of any king of memento mori like that, which is a sign of my inability to face my own mortality, I suppose.

But I think cultures which celebrate Day of the Dead (and similar) might have skeletons but not the gore-fest which has come from the US - but correct me if I'm wrong. It's the gruesome gore - especially when associated with serial killers, slasher movies etc that I think crosses a line.

Indeed. I saw someone suggesting getting rid of Christmas because they hate spending the money. Err...no.

You cannot deny that commercialisation of those holidays, that would be absurd.

I'm sure pagans would have a word with you about the origins and sanctity of those holidays anyway.

Yes, I do, OP. And I'm not saying that because I'm an evangelical Christian (I know a few who hate it for religious reasons). I'm agnostic.

I just think it's horrible! But then so is the traditional British Guy Fawkes' Night. Fine to celebrate the thwarting of a terrorist plot...but with the burning of the guy, it moves into extremely disturbing territory and becomes a celebration of gruesome revenge.

But so many cultures mark the beginning of winter and the darker months, so we need something. I just wish it could be more focused on a harvest festival theme - you could still have pumpkins and people could still dress up, decorate their homes and go round after sweets etc. It's just the horror I cringe at.

I also roll my eyes when people in the UK start celebrating festivals which come from other places in the world. I read about a Day of the Dead event - was it in London? But that's what they do in South America! Leave it to them - honestly, can't anyone have their own traditions any more without us aping them?

Well a simple google will show you otherwise. An accident happens in real time. Then areas get cordoned off well after the accident- as it takes time to get emergency services into that area (especially right in the centre of Edinburgh). It’s a Saturday and busy… so when this tragic accident happened, it set up a chain of events that- had it not been Halloween- would have normally had a far more hysterical reaction initially. But as it was Halloween, initial reactions were slower before people would have realised something awful had occurred.

I have a really difficult time believing this story. Especially as people would have been well aware of a coach accident and the street would have been cordoned off. So many news stories don’t really make sense when you examine the details.

😂😂😂

I am lrish as well and have no issue facing the reality of death and appreciate that we face it well with our funerals etc.
But it's totally overdoing it bringing coffins to kids parties . I have no difficulty with kids getting dressed up and having fun but it definitely has gone to an extreme since my childhood.

Thats not true.
Jack O Lantern is an ancient Celtic story. Samhain is the origin of Halloween which was absolutely there before All Saints Day.
They are both very old traditions but it didn't start with the Catholic tradition.
The spirit of Halloween is to remember and honour your deceased ancestors. The idea of dressing up was the belief that in late October the veil between the worlds is thinner so by dressing up you stop any souls who might be wondering the earth to want to come to you.
My dad refused to do pumpkins growing up and always did turnips because I quote- 'we are Irish, we're not having any of that American shite in our house' and to be fair a carved turnip is definitely a bit scarier looking than a pumpkin!
I didn't know about what happened in Edinburgh. I'm sorry to hear about such a tragedy.

Wait until you hear about 'Easter', when some guy gets nailed to a cross, or 'Christmas', when a young girl gets raped and not only has to keep the baby, but give birth to it in a shed.

Yup. And even as an atheist, who largely just celebrates festivals for the cultural aspect, there is far more meaning to me in the pagan traditions and marking the solstices than any of the Christian stuff that had been tacked onto the holidays.

There's a beauty, for example, in having a festival of lights to mark the darkest day of winter. As a non-believer, I don't care in the slightest that it's also been nominally selected as Jesus's birthday.

What a dreadful thing! Poor chap
.I don't really care for Halloween tbh.a friend when my son was young used to do dressing up partied.ds went as a firemans lovely. Now I think of all th sweets consumed by children. Dental association say stickers or play dough for little ones instead!

We're all going to die. You can't get around the reality of the situation by ignoring it. I worked in the death industry when I was younger, and far to many people try to avoid the fact that it is inevitable. I think that having a morbid little holiday is good for a lot of people. It may make light of a dark topic but it's far better then ignoring it.

Cukt I'm pretty sure hardly anyone celebrates Halloween as in the true sense of Samhaim as with other cultures with similar traditions.

Well you're wrong, loads of us celebrate it that way, and it is very meaningful.
YAB massively outrageous yourself to let a few sickos colour festivals that are significant to others. It's like if I said Christmas is about getting pissed and punching your BIL cos that's what some people do.

There's a whole genre of horror focussed around people making great art that deals with their own fears and universal ones so I object to your outright dismissal of that too. Death is something we all have to reckon with, if people do that playfully on Halloween it's not somehow a slap in the face to people in Gaza or anywhere else. Humour, jokes, play are a way that people can approach the huge truths of life and death that we can't change. It happens in many cultures.

For me it is not about gore, I celebrate it as a neopagan (and if you want to tell me how inauthentic that is I don't care, I'm comfortable with my practises as modern innovations influenced by limited knowledge of past ideas and customs) and for me it is about ancestry, mortality, and a thinner veil between realities.

Someone I love died a fortnight ago. Why would casting the realities of his death as "horrors", too dark to talk or think about, help me? The more we couch it in that language the more frightening it is.

@SpudleyLass "Christmas, Easter and Valentines Day are all about money" - er maybe to you, to a lot of people Christmas and Easter are actually religious festivals.

The north of England has had a history that is distinct from that of the home counties from at least Tudor times.

It was brutally subjugated under the Tudors but never wholly lost the old ways to the extent that parts closer to the centre of power did.

Not the point of the thread but whenever I see 'it's all over social media' about things like this I wonder who on earth the poster is 'friends' with / following and/or what their algorithms are.

I'm on Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / X and never seem to come across any of these awful videos that are apparently 'everywhere' (Images of Liam Payne's body, the video referenced in this thread etc).

I'd unfollow / block anyone sharing things like that into my timeline though.

A few points:

There were celebrations of the dead / Samhain style feasts all over the early Christian world.

You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the early Christian Church (followed by the RC church) was the highly centralized and homogenous organisation that it is nowadays.

The Feast of All Saints:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints%27_Day

The specific form it took in Ireland, with guising, groups traipsing from house to house and begging for food, hearths extinguished, local fires lit and hearths rekindled from the local fire, games involving none too serious divination of the future, carving of root vegetables with human faces, and the concept of what is now called Hallowe'en as a liminal time, a time when the veil between the material and the spirit world was thinned, allowing free passage from one to another, is well documented.

It is also well documented that the Irish (and Scots) took the rural customs with them to the US, where the customs of other ethnic groups mingled with their traditions. It has morphed into what we are now familiar with, but if you were to go to Ireland for Hallowe'en you would find many of the old customs, in particular the local bonfires, alive and kicking.

Various societies have special days where they remember the dead of the community or family ancestors with different rituals. Mexicans have Dia de Los Muertos, Poles have Dziady, Germans have St. Martin's Day (11 November), Austrians do Seleenwoche, the French have La Toussaint (All Saints). The latter two traditions are explicitly religious, but all the rest involve some form of guising or begging for food, often accompanying a religious observation of the holy day on 1 November. Many Catholics all over the world will participate in local secular 'Hallowe'en' traditions and also go to Mass on the feast of All Saints (1 November). The term Hallowe'en is an old term for the eve of All Hallows (aka saints).

The Roundheads and Puritans (Christian fundamentalists) poured cold water on most of the religious rituals and many secular or quasi religious traditions of English people, even banning the celebration of Christmas.

I'm an Irish Catholic and have seen quite a few dead people in their coffins in their houses, and also at funeral homes, both in Ireland and the US.

I feel I have a different attitude toward death, cemeteries, gravestones, etc. than you have. I don't consider the trappings of death 'dark', dreadful, or upsetting. The loss of the loved one, yes, very upsetting and very sad, something to grieve. But in the end, death is a part of life just as much as birth is.

If you're responding to SpoonHeader, we have no idea what their nationality is but, from their earlier disparaging post about the English, I would assume they aren't English.

Are you talking to me?

I'm Scots but stop with the bigotry.