Taking away Halloween...

[VodouDoll]

Clearly your coworker never heard of Bessie Colman, first American of any race or gender to obtain an international pilot's license. What did you say to your coworker?

I said, "What do you mean? Women can be pilots." She said, "Well, I guess so, but when you think of pilots you think of men." I said, "I do?" and she said, "Never mind," and walked away. I was kind of incredulous, to tell you the truth, especially since my kid's name is Amelia!

ETA: And Bessie Coleman is actually one of my personal heroes. What can I say? My husband and I are really into planes.

[jenny_islander]

Why is it anything goes? I thought Halloween was meant to be scary? Anyway, it seems lame that fundies are jumping on the 'it's Pagan and evil' bandwagon when all their other religious festivals are. Reminds me of my sister's then best friend's mother who insisted in sitting in a church for Halloween and said the nursery rhyme 'Jack jump over a candlestick' was about Satan and refused to read it to her kids :shock:

. . . "Jack Be Nimble" is Satanic? After the brouhaha about the old Procter & Gamble logo, I shouldn't be surprised, but good GRIEF.

Anyway, American Halloween was originally a night on which children sneaked out and raised hell--property damage mostly. Later it got to be a sort of Feast of Fools for kids, the one day of the year when they could . . .

1. Go out at night, in packs, without grown-ups.

2. Ring strangers' doorbells and demand treats.

3. Scare each other silly with ghost stories because they were out at night, walking past shadowy trees and houses, with help from homemade decorations. I remember (get off my lawn) when there were no Halloween-themed decorations for sale in stores ever, and cheap-o plastic-sheet costumes were considered to be inferior to homemade ones. Haunted houses were the big Halloween decorations.

4. Gorge on sweets (originally mostly homemade).

5. Wear wild wacky clothes that would never be allowed in any other setting.

6. Attend goofy parties at school or church where they played messy games like bobbing for apples or putting their hands in covered bowls full of "eyeballs" (peeled mini onions) or "brains" (Jello).

7. And do it all "in disguise," so that the neighbors would never know it was them (although they nearly always totally did!).

[blisterine]

WTF?!

my thought exactly! i guess aldi's is scarier than i thought!

[WanderingStar]

my thought exactly! i guess aldi's is scarier than i thought!

Teri Maxwell also claimed that back in the '80s, her first three kidlets were clinging to her legs and one up in her arms, and they were ready to go home. Supposedly they were scared by the trick-or-treaters' "evil" costumes. Methinks that maybe they were just tired and cranky and taking advantage of that, like I suspect from the pastor above, Steve convinced the children that the costumes were scary and of the devil. I realize that some kids do get scared easier than others but even most homemade kids' costumes usually aren't too horrifying. Apparently one time, when they began staying home and handing out candy and tracts together, Nathan was supposed to get the door and almost flew back to his dad to hide. I mean I can see why maybe Sarah would've been frightened, she was just a baby at the time, but Nathan was SIX by then. I honestly suspect some brainwashing going on even back then because most six-year-olds I know don't startle so easily by a simple witch or bedsheet ghost costume.

[freejoytoo]

. . . "Jack Be Nimble" is Satanic? After the brouhaha about the old Procter & Gamble logo, I shouldn't be surprised, but good GRIEF.

Anyway, American Halloween was originally a night on which children sneaked out and raised hell--property damage mostly. Later it got to be a sort of Feast of Fools for kids, the one day of the year when they could . . .

1. Go out at night, in packs, without grown-ups.

2. Ring strangers' doorbells and demand treats.

3. Scare each other silly with ghost stories because they were out at night, walking past shadowy trees and houses, with help from homemade decorations. I remember (get off my lawn) when there were no Halloween-themed decorations for sale in stores ever, and cheap-o plastic-sheet costumes were considered to be inferior to homemade ones. Haunted houses were the big Halloween decorations.

4. Gorge on sweets (originally mostly homemade).

5. Wear wild wacky clothes that would never be allowed in any other setting.

6. Attend goofy parties at school or church where they played messy games like bobbing for apples or putting their hands in covered bowls full of "eyeballs" (peeled mini onions) or "brains" (Jello).

7. And do it all "in disguise," so that the neighbors would never know it was them (although they nearly always totally did!).

Yeah. Apparently 'Jack' is Satan :shock: Luckily she was quite in a minority here.

ETA: Apparently 'Jack' was a pirate:

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/jack_be_nimble.htm

Thanks for the explanation. Britain has moved closer to how America celebrates Halloween and it has got much bigger, even from when I was young, but people only really dress up in scary costumes. You don't get any any Halloween unicorns. As I type this though, I've just remembered that when I was 13 I went to a friend's for a Halloween and we decided to go trick-or-treating in incredibly short skirts! I can't remember why we decided to do that. I remember someone wearing an incredible monster costume. Anyway, I digress. We do bob for apples, carve pumpkin lanterns and occasionally have parties.

[snarkbillie]

Why is it anything goes? I thought Halloween was meant to be scary? Anyway, it seems lame that fundies are jumping on the 'it's Pagan and evil' bandwagon when all their other religious festivals are. Reminds me of my sister's then best friend's mother who insisted in sitting in a church for Halloween and said the nursery rhyme 'Jack jump over a candlestick' was about Satan and refused to read it to her kids :shock:

I don't know. I usually like to dress up scary but this year I didn't want to. I don't know why it HAS to be scary. Seems a little bit too rulesy for me. I was looking at an ad for a costume shop and they had witches and vampires, but they also had Bo Peep and Hippies, neither of which are scary.

[Buggaboo]

I found this on my photobucket today while looking for something else and thought.....what better place to post it?

In honor of the fundies.

(Just look at all that satanic imagery, will ya?? :o :roll: )

[Lady Elaine]

Erica Shupe just posted a big write up on why Halloween is a no-no. *smile*

http://www.largefamiliesonpurpose.com/2 ... Purpose%29

[snarkbillie]

Erica Shupe just posted a big write up on why Halloween is a no-no. *smile*

http://www.largefamiliesonpurpose.com/2 ... Purpose%29

Oy with the *smile* already. I want to smack the *smile* right off her smug little face. *chuckle*

*gag*

[RandomTrivia]

Anything you want to be. That's the magic of Halloween. I can be a disco dancing unicorn dragon witch if I wanna. (and I do! so I will!)

This! It's Halloween, be whatever you can buy/make/rent/borrow a costume for, and have fun.

My son, age 5, wanted to be WordGirl for Halloween last year. I said sure, and worked up a pretty good costume, if I do say so myself. (I even made a Captain Huggyface costume for his stuffed Curious George.) I got some comments from my Mom ("Isn't there a boy character on WordGirl that he could be?"), but not really anyone else, and I said basically the same as snarkbillie. He'd already been Cookie Monster, Horton the Elephant (twice), and Bob the Builder. So, a monster, an elephant, a claymation construction worker, and a presumably-female alien who can fly.

As far as I ever heard, the only comment at his pre-school was from another Mom, who loved the costume and took a picture of it for her son (a fellow WordGirl fan). I was at the Halloween party, and none of the other kids really seemed to make the connection that WordGirl was, you know, a girl, and my son wasn't. :)

This year, he wants to be the R.M.S. Titanic, and I need to start working on the costume. It could get tricky, and he still thinks I can do anything, so I'd hate to disappoint him. Luckily our town isn't really fundified yet, so Halloween is still fun. I need to get out the decorations and start spreading the Halloween spirit.

Also, I'd love to see pictures of the Disco Dancing Uni-Dragon, and the little pilot.

[donks]

I went and read that blog... Yikes. I LOVE Halloween, it's 'MY' time of year, when I'm really in my element. Anyway, saw this answer to a readers comment and had to snag it:

Erika ShupeSeptember 26, 2012 6:44 AM

Maybe if a family no longer had young children at home who would see those costumes, they could pass out tracks instead of candy - but we would never encourage people to pass out candy. That's just encouraging the trick-or-treating.

Yeah. As a kid, If someone had handed me a tract I would have rolled their yard, toothpasted their car or beat their mailbox down with a stick. Just sayin'.

[Claddagh]

Erica Shupe just posted a big write up on why Halloween is a no-no. *smile*

http://www.largefamiliesonpurpose.com/2 ... Purpose%29

In a bizzare way it makes me laugh that she won't celebrate Hallowe'en but will celebrate Christmas and Easter which both have their roots in Pagan tradition....

This year, he wants to be the R.M.S. Titanic, and I need to start working on the costume.

When I was young a boy in my class went as an iceberg.

[fakepigtails73]

I don't know if it's just me that noticed that it seems that as the years go by I see less and less kids trick or treating in my neighbourhood. My area is very secular so it can't be due to fundie influence.

Really, what causes this? There are kids in the area...Is it due to paranoia of helicopter parents that see bad things everywhere? The thing is, I see kids costumed on their way to school on Halloween day, so it's not that people ignore it.

Hum... :think:

It's one of my fave hollyday, always been... :twisted: If I'd live in a single-dweeling house I'd go all out on decorations. Kids don't even ring my door for candies!

I think this year I'll be a zombie.

[donks]

I think the downturn in numbers of door-to-door TOTers is because of church held trunk or treats and the fact that malls and towns now offer TOTing. Lazy parents don't have to walk up and down hills or drive the kiddies from house to house (in rural areas). All the candy is right there within an easy (and in the case of malls, climate controlled) stroll.

I miss the old days.

[fakepigtails73]

I forgot to ask...

What the hell is "trunk or treating"? Why is it being done instead of the regular ringing the doorbell and receiving the candies thing?

Oh, all those Halloween memories remind me of this one house in my childhood neighbourhood where the lady always gave 1 single red apples instead of candies. A few yrs after she saw that barely any kids went to ring her bell so the next year she went all out and ended up giving tons of candies along with that red apple.

Anyone else remember carrying around the UNICEF box for pennies donations along with their candy bag? I did one year, and I'd say that 85% of the houses would have pocket change on standby along with the candy. Dropped the box at school the next morning. I read a few yrs ago that UNICEF were stopping the Halloween box program...

[snarkbillie]

What the hell is "trunk or treating"? Why is it being done instead of the regular ringing the doorbell and receiving the candies thing?

Trunk or treating is the tacky tradition of going around a parking lot and getting candy at each car. :(

[donks]

Trunk or treat is where people come to a designated spot (here it's the church's parking lot) they set up in the back of their truck or the trunk of their car by decorating it festively and hand out candy. Kinda like tailgating for kids. It sucks.

[ElphabaGalinda]

I forgot to ask...

What the hell is "trunk or treating"? Why is it being done instead of the regular ringing the doorbell and receiving the candies thing?

Oh, all those Halloween memories remind me of this one house in my childhood neighbourhood where the lady always gave 1 single red apples instead of candies. A few yrs after she saw that barely any kids went to ring her bell so the next year she went all out and ended up giving tons of candies along with that red apple.

Anyone else remember carrying around the UNICEF box for pennies donations along with their candy bag? I did one year, and I'd say that 85% of the houses would have pocket change on standby along with the candy. Dropped the box at school the next morning. I read a few yrs ago that UNICEF were stopping the Halloween box program...

I loved doing those unicef box things, i did it a few times. I'm so sad they're stopping it! I always keep all my extra pennies to give to kids who do that.

[donks]

When my son was little, we'd deck out our Kawasaki Mule as The Halloween Express. Good times! Streamers, a HUGE spider strapped to the top of it, scary music blaring and several of his friends along for the ride. We live in a rural area, but there's a small neighborhood on top of a nearby hill, so we'd hit all the houses on the right side of the road on the way to the subdivision, then hit that neighborhood, then the homes on the other side on the way back. TONS of candy!!!! Then we'd have a bonfire, toast marshmallows and tell scary stories.

[fakepigtails73]

Trunk or treating is the tacky tradition of going around a parking lot and getting candy at each car. :(

Yikes! How boring is that! So weird.

The fun of trick or treating is the coming and going from house to house while ringing on doorbells. Cool way to make acquaintance with the neighbours.

I miss the "insouciance" of my childhood: on weekend days I'd leave the house at 9AM and I wasn't allowed to come back until supper time. We spent those days playing, pretty much unorganised and unsupervised. The only organised activity I had from age 4 to 12 was my figure skating, and that was on friday evenings.

No one would have thought of giving out candies from parked cars. We did go trick or treating pretty early, as soon as sundown came. Parents came with us until we were 6 or 7; after that we were on our own, but since we were a good group with my 13 yr-old cousin with us they didn't worry. Everyone in the neighbourhood pretty much knew each other, and a police car would come and go often.

That way of trick or treating is how most people in North America experienced it, me thinks? Costumed trick or treating seems to be a recent custom in Europe; I wonder if Australians celebrate it as well??

[Rosa]

Everywhere I've lived has been door-to-door, and in neighborhoods with single-family homes people decorate like crazy.

Friends of ours live in a suburb where the trick-or-treating is organized by the city government, with designated houses and a candy budget and stuff. Our friends were the captain house on their block or something. I'm not quite sure why but it's a strangely locked-down suburb (no overnight street parking anywhere, for example.) Anyway, it still *looked* totally normal from the outside - my friend's husband dressed up like a scarecrow and sat very quietly in a lawn chair with the candy bowl in his lap, scaring kids when they grabbed the candy.

[RachelB]

Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid, because I got to pretend to be somebody else for a day. In retrospect, I think I was trying on lives that were more appealing than my own-- it was a way of registering dissatisfaction without being able to articulate it.

I wonder if, all that rhetoric about scary and sexualized costumes aside, part of what fundamentalists dislike about the holiday is that it encourages children to think about what it might be like to be somebody else. If your priority is to teach your kids that there's only one right way to be, you don't want to encourage them to imagine walking in someone else's shoes-- those shoes obviously walk straight to hell.

The prospect of being "anyone you want," even for one day a year, seems like it would be threatening to any family that believes what you want is irrelevant.

[Jana814]

Trunk or treat is where people come to a designated spot (here it's the church's parking lot) they set up in the back of their truck or the trunk of their car by decorating it festively and hand out candy. Kinda like tailgating for kids. It sucks.

My town did something like that this past Halloween, the reason for it is that they had to cancel treat-or-treating on the 31st because of down power lines, so in order for the families to get rid of the candy the bought that was a way to do it. They did it at our town pool parking lot. Someone that I know said it was really cool to see it being done, also many of these kids got more candy that normal because they went to people whos house they probably would not have gone to.

[jenny_islander]

Our town has downtown trick-or-treat on Halloween before sunset because that's the time of year when the air is usually clammy while the sun is up, and then all the moisture freezes to the sidewalk at sundown, plus the wind chill is often down near zero F. So downtown is swarming with princesses, ninjas, vampires, superheroes, kitty cats, and ghosts from 3:30 to 6:00. You can go to any business that has a little orange sign in the window. Some businesses go all out with haunted houses and costumed employees. It's a lot of fun. Kids still TOT at houses, of course.

[aelar]

I have to say, I think trunk-or-treats are kinda neat, based on the one I went to in Washington State. The trunks were all decorated in themes, and the people giving out candy seemed really into it, with matching costumes and stuff. Way more fun than mall trick-or-treating, which would have been the only other option for kids in the area we lived in. Houses were a quarter mile apart, longer when you count the driveways, and no sidewalks or lights. Even being driven around, you couldn't really get a small kid to more than a half-dozen houses before everyone would be sick of the whole getting into and out of the car/car-seat routine.

The trunk-or-treat was at a church, and there was a harvest festival going on inside, but no one said anything about scary costumes, there wasn't any god-stuff being overtly pushed, it was just a big community costume party that happened to be at a church hall.

In my area, even though we're a dense urban neighborhood of most single-family and small apartment buildings, we don't get more than a half-dozen kids a year, which makes me sad. It's partly that there just aren't that many kids, it's not like when I was young (I'm in my late 30s) and most houses in these kinds of neighborhoods had two or three kids. Most of the houses today have no kids, and most of the people I know planning to have kids plan to have only one, two at most, so it just cuts down on how many kids there are to trick-or-treat in any given year. Plus it seems like the holiday spirit just isn't in people these days, between being busy, jaded, poor, or just not into it due to cultural differences. Almost no one puts up Christmas lights, and it's the same with Halloween, almost everyone keeps their porch light off.

There's a trunk-or-treat at the local high school I found out, and I might take my daughter up there, just to have a place where people who are into Halloween are gathered, and where her costume will be appreciated, and maybe we can even snag some candy. Back home, we'll have the lights on, and our cauldron of play-dough and glow bracelets, but we don't expect to have many takers. :(