Betty thinks Halloween is the perfect excuse to get dolled up and hit the town, but others don’t agree. Image: quinn.amya/Flickr
Prepare your pumpkins and collect your kindling, we have now settled into the depths of autumn. It’s that time of year when small children smash their way into the homes of OAPs and demand sweets; when any childless person with pubic hair spatters themselves with red paint and tears holes into Primark’s latest clothing range; when fully grown adults watch out-dated horror films on a volume that renders their door bell useless.
Yes, that’s right, I hope you’ve all enjoyed the pun filled ‘scarily fun’, ‘spookily joyful’ festival that the Celts called Samuin (summers end). It is now considered by many to be just another corporate holiday, during which regular foods, in slightly different colours and shapes, fill those shelves near the tills in supermarkets that were made only for 2 for 1 offers on Pepsi and Doritos.
Whether you controversially attempted to recreate the look of a recently deceased celebrity or reinvented your favourite bedsheet into a slutty ghost costume, this is yet another perfectly dire excuse to dress up and drink up only to wake up to a semi-costumed snoring animal to remember exactly what it was you wanted to forget.
Ah yes, and then there is Bonfire night, where communities collect together on large fields and begin the happy British tradition of creating a perfect home for the friendly neighbourhood hedgehogs and then torching the lot of them.
Standing astride the pile of scorched quills stands a man who reminds us of what can happen if you mess with the government.
We rub our hands together in the bitter cold and watch our breath freeze in the air and shatter into shards of salivary ice on the floor.
Eventually we see the night off with a firework display, something that manages to push the toffee apple down to fourth position in the rankings of most underwhelming things ever to have been invented, just behind 3D cinema and wedding receptions.
Although Guy Fawkes takes the medal for starting such a festival off, it wasn’t always him atop the bonfire. Oh no, has any British festival such a simple past?
Before now effigies of prominent figures in the Catholic church were scorched, the Pope being a firm favourite of puritanical England – though they generally settled for any old figure of hate.
Really, I think we should go back to the origins of both of these festivals.
Get together with your friends and family and bring all the wood you can find. Then, erect an enormous straw doll with David Cameron’s face strapped to the top, or, alternatively, whichever of the X Factor lot has grabbed too many headlines that week.
And then get the children of the neighbourhood to dance around happily throwing their homemade Molotov cocktails into the middle, shrieking with delight before tearing down whatever’s left and using the tortured remains of your selected celebrity as a sweetless piñata, to prepare the little kiddies for a lifetime of disappointment.
And as for Halloween, I spend it in the same way it was intended; a festival of the dead.
I sit hunched in a corner of my living room, festively drinking a bottle of blood red wine and running to the hall to scream in the faces of those who dare to darken my doorway with their tiny, tiny shadows.
I’ll wish that all the rock and roll zombies, Twilight look-a-likes, and half-hearted thriller costume wearers outside would join those who were originally the centrepiece of the Hallows Eve festivities in the grounds of medieval churches and the memories of their respective families.