Halloween

Halloween is now something which we traditionally celebrate in this country even though most of us haven't got the foggiest idea why. The current "trick or treat" celebrations appear to have crossed the Atlantic from the United States where they go for it in a really big way. Which is somewhat surprising, given that USA has an abundance of population who think that the world is 6,000 years old, Jesus' mum never had sex and that brown people go to hell for being, well, brown.

Halloween or "All hallows eve" does of course fall before the Christian "All Saints Day". Not content with having a special day for each of these minor deities, they have one big PAR-TAY for the whole lot of them. And why not? You don't become a Saint for nothing - you have to die first for a start - and all that stained glass doesn't come cheap.

So Halloween is a celebration of what? The early Christian church's persecution of young female rape victims as witches? A demonstration of the evil on earth, from which you can only be saved by being buggered by a Roman Catholic priest?

There is, of course, the early Pagan festivals from this time of year, like Samhain, Calan Gaeaf and Hop-tu Naa, which celebrate the coming of darker days and remembrance of the dead. These were days when people would worship whatever the gods they liked in whatever way they liked. This usually involved drinking, smoking intoxicating herbs and having sex with each other. And jolly popular such festivals were.

Of course the Christians couldn't have all of this enjoying yourself, so they promptly hijacked all of our pagan festivals and invented Christian ones to fall at the same time, so that the drunken, illiterate and frankly stupid population could just get on with it but apparently in the name of this new monotheistic entity who will forgive all of our transgressions, or send us to burn in eternal hell depending on whether you say the right thing or not.

As Tom Jones used to say, this sort of thing was not unusual. The winter festival of Yule - oh we'll call that Christmas ("Wasn't Jesus born in June?" "Shhhh!"). The Spring Equinox? We'll call that Easter (they even move the date depending on the sequence of the moon - VERY biblical that. What date did Jesus die exactly?) and there are many more.

There are still quite a few "fundies" who get all hot and bothered about Halloween, exposing our children to "evil spirits" and the like. Now frankly, I couldn't give a rat's 'nads about it. But anything that upsets fundamentalists from ANY religion gets my vote. In your Pumpkin face, god!