I know it’s silly to care, but creeping Americanisation bothers me. I love the differences - it makes going on holiday over there so exciting - like being in a film. But I don’t like it when it erodes our traditions - we don’t want everywhere to be exactly the same, do we?. And it’s even worse when they take our ideas and claim they were theirs all along. Anyway, I quote from this week’s Sunday Times - “the formal dance at the end of the the school year used to be a solely American rite of passage” They go on to say that it is now a “staple” of the British school experience. One mum quoted says it is an inevitability of the Americanisation of our culture.
Well, perhaps that is true in England, I don’t know. But in Scotland the school I attended in the 1970s and the one my children attended in the 1990s - 2000s, and the schools my friends went to, have held “Leaving Balls” since at least the 1950s (perhaps earlier but I have no-one left to ask). It was all arranged by the Ball Committee which was elected at the beginning of the school year.The girls wore ballgowns , not “prom dresses” and boys wore dinner jackets, not “tuxes”, and they got together to get ready and do hair and makeup. The dresses were bought in Debenhams or John Lewis or local independent dress shops, who kept a note of which schools the girls came from to avoid duplicates. You did not need a date, as all the leavers were invited, and no outsiders were allowed. There was no Queen or King. And I know that only last week as term ended our local schools had Leaving Balls, not proms. So what’s American about that?
Same with Halloween - this was huge in Scotland - we dressed up and went out guising - we performed a song or poem or dance in return for sweets - no threat of “tricking” was involved. We had bonfires and fireworks and clootie dumpling, treacle scones and dooking for apples. And I know this goes back at least 100 years (in fact having looked it up it goes back to the 16th century) . So I ask again, what’s American about that?
Yet I hear complaints that folk don’t like Halloween because it is so American.
And don’t get me started on Hogmanay…
So let’s celebrate our own traditions and pick up some fun ones from other cultures, yes, including the USA.
Thanksgiving, anyone?