AIBU to be completely pissed off with Halloween?

[inabizzlefam]

Since when did we (the UK) start "celebrating Halloween?
Isn't it some weird american tradition?
I get Bonfire Night, fireworks, Penny for the Guy, etc, but all this Halloween shit everywhere (TV, supermarkets,etc) is seriously pissing me off. As if we don't have enough on with christmas decorations in the shops........in October, FFS.
To cap it all I now find myself being nagged senseless by my DCs to take them Trick or Treating, which I loathe. The joy in traipsing round the neighbourhood in the dark, freezing cold, bored shitless, knocking on peoples doors, "begging" sweets off them is ludicrous......I could buy a huge tub of sweets for my own DCs and get to sit in my nice warm house, not pissing off my neigbours....everyone's a winner. Neighbours get left in peace and DCs get to stuff themselves full of crap.
Apparantly, I am being a killjoy and "not entering into the spirit of the celebration".
What celebration? It's a bloody american celebration. What next, Thanksgiving? (TBH I have no idea what thats all about either....2 christmas dinners?

forallthesaints- that's a joke right?

Thank God for the Americans and their pumpkins is all I can say. You had to set aside about five days to hollow out your swede back in the dark ages [

I'm 50 and no-one made any deal of Halloween when I was little. Mischievous Night was a thing here in the North. No trick or treating, completely unheard of. Carved out swedes was about it tbh.

calling it Samhain in this day and age is a bit like insisting on "artisanal sausage rolls"

Different religions refer to Halloween as differs things. I have always referred to it as Samhain, as did my parents, my grandparents and my children. What a rude post.

I have hosted a (grown up) Halloween party for the last 20 years. When I first started, it was quite hard getting hold of Halloween decs, themed food etc. Now they're everywhere. Personally, I'm taking full credit.

By the way, how do you pronounce Samhain?

MN is so predictable.

'I object to modern overdoing and tatification of Christmas/ Halloween /whatever, it feels so American'

'Well you're ignorant. Actually, that feast originates with the druids and that's why my kids celebrate it.'

I did turnip lanterns and dooking for apples as a kid, great fun. But the shops weren't full of plastic tat designed to be used once then binned. And I don't ever remember connecting it with the end of harvest.

Have the 'it's a druid festival' types been in a supermarket or pound shop lately? Where do you think the modern trend for needing to buy loads of tat to mark every celebration comes from?

I'm in the UK and I've done it for at least 20 years.

So 'we' have been celebrating it for that long.

HTH.

Stand your ground op. The whole thing is ridiculous and I think this year it's the worst it's ever been. I think it has finally embedded itself as has valentines day and Black Friday -- all American traditions.

Morris but that's not the fault of Halloween, or indeed Christmas. It's a symptom of our consumerist society. All festivals, indeed birthdays, kit we need for our garden, trampolines, huge water pistols for summer play, the number of clothes and shoes we all have, handbag obsessed women, we fill our lives with tat, it's no surprise that Halloween is a victim to this ethos too.
I don't to stop living or celebration because of it though.

We can decide how much to participate in consumerist marketing. I refuse to let the beast win. Giving up all together is a sad option. Our society is richer for our celebrations and festivals, to write them off is defeatist.
I love halloween, we will be carving pumpkins, making pumpkin soup and ghostly food, dressing up and having fun.
You always have the choice of how much plastic tat you let into your life.

Startled its pronounced Sow-In

Oh and I think we mean that it's been Americanised e.g all these commercial decorations and trick or treating. The parts that are actually people's tradition I don't mind. Obviously Halloween has been around for many years, but not to this aggressive commercial degree.

it's the 3 weeks solid of fireworks until the early hours round here that does my head in. Not they are celebrating Halloween specifically to be fair. If- they are in the shops and make enormous bangs, then (apparently) you have to stay up till 2 in the morning firing the things.

Decorations have always been part of halloween, as has trick or treating. Called guising in Scotland the activity of traipsing around doors dressed as a goul and being given fruit or sweets is common to much of Europe and can be traced back hundreds of years.

I rather like the ToTing and community elements of Halloween. I could do without children knocking on undecorated houses' doors, and the antisocial egg/tyre stuff.

We celebrated Halloween when we were kids, forty odd years ago, apple dunking, making toffee and parkin. I think what makes it a bit annoying is the gorefest it seems to have become courtesy of the supermarkets and -tat-poundshops. I don't mind little dumpling babies dressed as pumpkins, but I hate to see children in slasher costumes dripping with blood, and all the horrible electronicy crap with the death heads etc. SIL in Florida says her eldest (13) has deemed herself too old for Halloween and trick or treating . Their girls used to dress up, but as cartoon characters, or storybook characters - no blood and gore in sight.

We celebrate numerous festivals at home, but it does make me a bit sad to see the shops turning traditional, regional, seasonal and low key festivals into the next retail opportunity and almost bullying people into thinking that they have to buy Halloween cupcakes, and tubs of Haribo, or spending £50 on fireworks, or buying haggis and a kilt for Burns night even though you live in Slough and wouldn't know a timorous beastie if it ran up your trouser leg.

Hate it. We choose not to celebrate Halloween as is our choice
No decorations - lights off etc
It's begging with menaces - should be banned

Well thankfully Heather it won't or ever will be banned so people that actually do enjoy it can have a bit of a fun. I get that not everyone likes the same things but I don't get the relentless moaning you see on here from some people, no-one is forcing people to like it or participate.

Bingo 😄

In the 70s and 80s when I was little, the shops sold plastic masks of scary things (werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, ghost etc), vampire fangs, blood and cape and witches hats.

The costumes and decorations were more key, but, as previous posters have said, everything was lower key - Christmas decorations were baubles, tinsel, lights and paper chains, Easter decorations didn't exist, birthday parties were a load of kids playing musical statues at home, and seasonal decor in general mostly involved the choice of flowers you put in a vase.

How the hell do you carve a swede?! I struggle to cut one up for the Sunday roast!

I've no problem with hallowe'en though although don't actively join in.

"Thank God for the Americans and their pumpkins is all I can say. You had to set aside about five days to hollow out your swede back in the dark ages!"

Oh god yes I remember that! I used to do the dreaded job with the pointy end of a an old-fashioned tin opener, and it really did take hours! The joy when I realised pumpkins came ready hollowed as it were, and just needed the fun bits with the eyes and mouth styling.

This was the 70s and we used to decorate the walls with home-made witch silhouettes in black card, and have a fondue party by candlelight, then apple-bobbing. Any excuse for a fun night in the darkening days of coming winter...

Agatha Christie wrote a novel Hallowe'en Party in the 1960s, with creepy games, apple-bobbing, and a murder of course.

I prefer 'Hallowe'en Lite', with jolly orange pumpins and black cats abounding and less of the zombie/horror stuff which can be frankly errr horrifying but that's ironic as I'm currently gobbling up the Walking Dead two episodes a day (a late-comer, only just discovered it.)

It's very difficult and takes ages and usually involves an injury.

You slice off the top, and then score lines in the flesh to make sort of cubes, and you scrape and scrape for hours with a knife and very strong spoon. At some point, the knife will slip and you will cut yourself. And then, when it's hollow, you jab it with a knife to cut a very rudimentary face shape. And you make holes in the sides for the string to carry it, which I'd forgotten about.