When do you put up your Halloween decs?

[Greenbutterlfy566]

When do you put up your Halloween decs?

Don't understand all the plastic tat, single use, carbon footprint comments. We use the same box of decorations every year. We don't buy new and throw away every year. Surely no one does that?!

(I say that as someone who is always trying to reduce our waste by the way. Bars of shampoo, conditioner and soap, using cloth nappies when baby is born, wax cloths for food ect. So if I'm completely missing the point please let me know!)

Anyway to answer the question, I normally put them up on the day and take them down the next. The pumpkins get left out at the end of the garden (where no one can see them) for the birds/to decompose naturally. The dogs normally have a nibble too.

Don't understand all the plastic tat, single use, carbon footprint comments. We use the same box of decorations every year. We don't buy new and throw away every year. Surely no one does that?!

The shops are full of Halloween shit. Do you seriously think that’s the same stick from last year? You might not be buying it but that shit in shops is going somewhere year after year and eventually landfill.

Actually on the day normally and only in the house for the kids.

Everybody knows Halloween was a marked event historically in Britian.

Actually they don't. Every year each Halloween thread is littered with "Halloween has never been celebrated in UK it's a terrible USA import"
"Never heard of Halloween in UK before trick or treating"
"Another USA nonsense brought to uk" type posts. Every fecking year. And if people want to inject a bit of fun in their lives that's fine. People have birthday parties with balloons (how environmentally friendly are they?) and a host if other decs so why is that ok but Halloween once a year isn't?

But this thread isn't about Christmas
Well some people are comparing them.and implying 4 months of Xmas 'tat' in shops is ok but 2 weeks of Halloween isn't.
And there is a hell of a lot more commercialism around Xmas than there is at Halloween but it's Halloween that's berated every sodding year.

Not all of us put decs up weeks before Halloween mostly just for the day but what business is of anyone's for the people who do? They aren't putting them up in anyone else's garden.

The shops are full of Halloween shit. Do you seriously think that’s the same stick from last year? You might not be buying it but that shit in shops is going somewhere year after year and eventually landfill.

They've also been full of about 3 times more Xmas stuff for weeks but I don't see anyone banging on about that. But Xmas is 'special apparently. Well Halloween is special to a lot of us.

Actyally can someone point out one of the many xmas threads where people have piled in berating those who.celebrate Xmas for bringing.on Armageddon?
Nope?

mathanxiety so if it’s not created by the retail industry, why are you and others putting up decorations two weeks early?

It seriously wasn't created by the retail industry, if that's the point you are trying to make.

Hallowe'en isn't a Hallmark Holiday like Secretaries Day or some such nonsense. It goes back thousands of years, with traditions added and cast off over the millennia, most notably the superimposing of Christian belief and practices.

In latter years Trick or Treating has taken hold alongside others. As a child we traipsed from house to house in our costumes and masks looking for apples and nuts, then the neighbourhood gathered around a massive bonfire. Traditions develop from earlier traditions - Hallowe'en used to feature nocturnal mischief and leaving out food offerings for the spirits of the dead, and it's fairly easy to see how trick or treating eventually developed into the form we know today. I have fond memories of Hallowe'en parties, bobbing for apples, making masks in Art class in school. There are fireworks in Dublin now (they used to be banned in Ireland).

When I was a child in Dublin the neighbourhood kids used to go around looking for dry branches and hedge clippings, and bits of old lumber to build a whopping bonfire in the local green space beginning a couple of weeks ahead of the event. Should they have waited until the 30th of October, very possibly the rainiest day of the year, possibly a school day, to get this organised, on the basis that it is somehow unseemly to have any sort of display up until the actual day? Should I wait until the day itself to make barm brack? I normally make it the weekend before Hallowe'en.

Millions and millions of Irish people celebrate Hallowe'en, both traditionally and 'secularly'. I go to Mass on the feast of All Saints. That is my observation of the holiday itself seen to, and I also give out candy to trick or treaters. I put up Hallowe'en decorations when I can, before Hallowe'en.

This year I put the decorations up two weeks early because there's enough light to get the job done after I get home from work now but it's getting progressively darker in the evenings and therefore potentially too dark to do a nice job in a few weeks time, and the weather was forecast to take a turn for the worse today (40 degrees fahrenheit of a negative change) with possible snow by Hallowe'en (happened a few years ago). I will go out and buy candy to give to the trick or treaters on Hallowe'en day itself as supermarkets have sales that day, and also because it calls my name if I leave it sitting in the kitchen for too long...

CupCupGoose hopefully your soaps don't have palm oil in them.

@CupCupGoose off topic but which conditioner bars do you use?

Trewser Sat 12-Oct-19 09:09:23

Yes I hate the over commercialism at Christmas too. It could be a lovely three day holiday with a few lights, good food and family and friends. I find the bludgeoning insistence of all the Christmas bedding, tableware etc utterly mind numbing

An interesting post because there is no mention at all of the Christian religious observation of the holiday. The rest of it is all tat/gravy and whether it's your thing or not is a matter of personal taste.

Well I go to church! But i dont think only Christians should be able to celebrate. I don't think only pagans should be able to celebrate Halloween either, but I respect their need to.

@mathanxiety now don't go talking about your Irish traditions, we all know how ignorant some people are about the Irish! 😉

@Lefic, I see what you mean but on a personal level, if you don't buy new and reuse what you have every year, you aren't contributing to landfill. Some of mine were given to me by my mum who used them for my youngest brother.

@mathanxiety, I'm not trying to make out I'm a Saint, I just do what I can. I'm not judging anyone else. And actually I love Lucy bee coconut oil soaps bevause they don't contain palm oil.

Why on earth would I want to do two lots of decorating?
Why does that have any bearing in what other people do?

Maybe if I had kids that were hyped up by coloured plastic then I would have been more likely to get sucked in.

Don't be so bloody smug.

I don't think only pagans should be able to celebrate Halloween either, but I respect their need to.
But apparently only if they celebrate it in a way that suits you? That's not respecting anyone.

Love Halloween but I only put the pumpkins out a couple days beforehand as they look better freshly carved. Insides go into a suitably autumnal recipe for the night. I’d normally have made leaf wreaths to go up about now (DS and I would collect them on school run) but they’ve been absolutely sodden here! On the day I’ll add battery-operated pillar candles, fairy lights, large paper black bats... I prefer a ‘traditional’ or seasonal look rather than gore, though DSD likes that type better and would be thrilled if we did a full-on House of Horrors. DP is the type to go to Tesco day before and enthusiastically buy lots of cheap flimsy plastic tat, but we get a few troublesome groups of teens meeting in front/at side of our house so he won’t bother anymore.

There is a house near us that has had its Halloween decs up since Monday!

The Christmas aisles in supermarkets at moment can fuuuuuccckkkk offfffff, btw.

@Bluewavescrashing I use lush ones. They aren't great but I've recently cut my hair to shoulder length so it's not too bad. I don't think I could use them if I still had long hair as there is barely any lather on them and are a pain to use!

I don't.

Why does that have any bearing in what other people do?

It doesn't. You are free to do what you like. Why is it so important that we all think your plastic decorations are fabulous?

willow I haven't really posted on MN in years, it's almost reassuring to see people trotting out the same tired "Halloween is so American" arguments like always 😂 There used to be a Halloween thread specifically for those of us who loved it (usually as a reaction to moaning like on this thread), does that still happen?

For those that feel Hallowe'en has no tradition in the UK. Like MathsAnxiety - I spent my childhood Hallowe'en in Ireland, Northern Ireland (part of UK for those who need reminding) visiting houses dressed up in my parents old clothes with a scary mask on...groups usually visited in families and my parents would have great fun trying to guess who the kids were behind the masks - sometimes we'd be standing on people's doors for well over 5 mins while they guessed. Some people (older people) insisted on a song or a poem before you got a handful of nut or an apple. The whole community got involved. So definitely not a new thing to us - celebrated differently now to how it was back then but I would say the same for Christmas.

I would like to add that I had a almost identical experience to @soggypizza in the west coast of Scotland, which again is part of the UK.
We also wore our costumes to school and had a party there and this was not new fangled 40 years ago, people in their 80's participated in this.

While Halloween isn't a new thing, it was always limited to parties and guising on the night

I'm not sure anyone is disputing that

What we didn't have was the month long tat fest. And definitely no trick or treating, it's guising

Kids that come to our door always do a party piece. That's our tradition

Guising?! not sure what that is and it's certainly not something we did in N Ireland. We went around the doors...is guising maybe what the Scots do? Is it connected to Guy Fawkes?

It's weirdis it not for someone to insist they know what you did in your childhood, but then there seems to be lots of that on this thread - being told by poster that Hallowe'en isn't traditionally celebrated in the UK because it isn't celebrated in their part of the UK - is this the forgetting that there are 4 countries in the UK we are all not English!

US based and I’m putting ours up today. This is late for us, the rest of the street has jabs theirs up for at least a week.

Skeletons sat around the garden, a graveyard, 6 ft fake spiders on the house, pumpkins galore. I love it! That said, we celebrated Halloween even when we lived in the UK. My eldest is now mid 20s but still went trick or treating, as did I as a kid in rural England.