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

[Mamabear04]

TW for talking about the tragic accident that happened in Edinburgh yesterday evening.

I just don't understand why people celebrate Halloween or indulge in horror when the reality of it is just so awful. I mean there is enough horror in the world why would anyone want to celebrate violence and death? I know a lot of people will say that you can celebrate it in a happy way with nice costumes with songs, poems and sweets but at the heart of it, it does celebrate death and gore otherwise why would all the merch be skeletons and ghosts etc? That poor man in Edinburgh and his poor family and all the people who thought that the horrific incident was a Halloween prop. Why are people so disconnected from the reality of what it truly represents? I'm pretty sure hardly anyone celebrates Halloween as in the true sense of Samhaim as with other cultures with similar traditions. Everywhere I've looked for the past month just seems gore and death. Lots of people I follow on Instagram posting dress up of their kids in horror centred costumes and then in the next story it's about how awful all the death and destruction in Gaza. It just seems to bizarre to me. AIBU to just think with all the news, images, films at our finger tips that people just don't have a sense of the reality of things? That people are so numb to it?

The Irish Times is 164 years old and it has only briefly once allowed a woman to be editor, it is currently bashing Catholics for misogyny.

I gather the first Catholic editor did not happen until the 1980s.

Christmas, Easter and Valentines Day are all about money.

The worst aspects about modern gardens, falsely blamed on the domestic cat, are patios and fake grass. Literally, modern gardens and their designs is what is killing birds and insects.

There is nothing more wrong about Halloween than any of the others. But only Hallow seems to receive this vitriol - don't know why.

Are some people unaccpeting of their own mortality, perhaps?

I stick by my first post. Halloween was a three day event. I note there has been no ancient answer to who was Holy previously?

Bore off you weirdo.

It is gory when you think about it, but I think people just want a bit of fun. Horror has always been part of stories, including children's stories. Remember the Ugly Sister cutting off her heel to fit into Cinderella's glass slipper?

God, that is SO rude!

Tell me more, @Spoonheader. What kind of Halloween did you celebrate? And who was holy previously?

Wait until people hear of the story of "Sqeet Fanny Addams".

*Sweet

Yeah the OP reads in a very pearl-clutchy Helen Lovejoy 'won't someone think of the children?!' manner.
Unnecessary histrionics.

Who was Jack in this context? I'm not aware of any Saint Jacks...

We get this ignorance every Halloween on here (largely as its predominantly English posters on here).

Halloween, as celebrated today, is a secular Irish/Scottish custom. All of it.

Minor details such as swapping a pumpkin (US) for a turnip (which I carved), and saying "trick or treat" (a phrase from Canada) rather than the numerous interjections that preceded it, are the only changes from the Halloween of my youth, and my parents, and their parents.

Guisers from 1890 in Ayr, Scotland;

"I had mind it was Halloween . . . the wee boys were at it already, running about with their false faces on and their bits o’ turnip lanterns in their hand."

*False faces is what we in Ireland (and Scotland) call masks.

Guising is then first recorded in North America in 1911 (Irish/Scottish migration), in Ontario, Canada, the same province where 6 years later today's most common interjection "trick or treat" was first used.

Back to The Irish Times (from 2014)

"The expression trick or treat has only been used at front doors for the last 10 to 15 years. Before that "Help the Halloween Party" seems to have been the most popular phrase to holler."

And regards pranks, ghosts etc, this has been recorded at Halloween here for over two centuries. Scottish poet John Mayne from 1780: "What fearfu' pranks ensue".

I'm not disagreeing about the church stuff but I'm in England ( north) and we also went guising. It wasn't restricted to the Scots ( or Irish), indeed most of our customs are shared.

I inadvertently fed the troll for a while, but you're welcome to take over. It's making nonsensical and ahistorical arguments about the origins of Halloween.

What I think its trying to argue here is that because All Saints Day is a Catholic "Holy Day" then, therefore, Samhain never existed.

If that sounds really stupid and nonsensical to you, that's because it is.

Excellently put. There's also some proof going even further back in Ireland of "mumming" (in the early modern period? I can't remember), which was similar to going round the doors/guising. I'd have to go searching to dig up the dates now, but I'll try and find 'em tomorrow! Really fascinating how it's evolved.

Halloween stopped in England as the anti catholic November 5th custom supplanted it.

This didn't happen in Scotland as the Kirk (church) maintained the tradition there, and obviously Ireland wasn't going to mark November 5th. Hence, Halloween has been an exclusively Irish/Scottish custom since, and they developed it into a secular (ie. non religious) custom.

As British we are too scared to talk about Death anyway

We will all die. We need to be able to talk frankly and openly about that and not treat death as something dirty or secret or scary. There is nothing scary about a coffin or gravestone except for the reminder of mortality. Past generations were far more open to this being present, think Memento Mori.

Hangings, burning at the stake, beheadings... all used to be public events. Things people would travel to watch. Actual horror. Not fake bloody and CGI.

Some people get their adrenaline rush from rollercoasters, some from extreme sports, some from horror movies.

The event in Edinburgh was tragic. And those men who found the head will probably have nightmares for weeks after finding it was real. But it doesn't mean Halloween is wicked or evil or should be banned

(And that's without getting into the historical aspect which has been well covered already)

Imagine me, an Irish person, telling an English person about the history of Morris Dancing or cricket or (insert another very English custom not marked in Ireland).

We get this nonsense from the English every Halloween on here. You know zip about Halloween.

I'm sorry but it didn't. Saying that it's exclusively Irish/Scottish ignores our history in certain parts of the country. Our culture descends modern borders.

Are you talking to me?

I'm Scots but stop with the bigotry.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.