Bush Girl
Well-Known Member
I'm curious......if you don't celebrate Halloween in your country do you celebrate anything else at this time of year?
Here in the UK, trick or treating is beginning to get more popular with little kids, although thank goodness the menace of scary teenagers demanding money instead of sweets after 9pm seems to have stopped. My kids like to dress up and we knock on friends' doors but Halloween is severely stricted to Oct 31st only, lasts for about a grand total of 1½ hrs and doesn't involve dressing the house up weeks in advance like Christmas.
What we're all waiting for here in Britain is Guy Fawke's Night on Nov 5th - when we celebrate the foiling of a Catholic plot to blow up parliament in 1604. There's nothing like a nice modern festival - and this is nothing like a nice modern festival :hurt:
We have fireworks and a big bonfire although very few now have a Guy sitting on the top to be burnt as the symbolism is just a little too real. Of course, being November, it frequently rains but the bonfires are usually that big that they can cope with this. When I was a child lots of people had their own back yard fireworks parties but there were so many accidents and public announcement programmes against this that these days most councils put on a display so everyone troops off to their local park to watch. It's also dark by 5.30 or so by then, so this is definitely a family thing, although my local park also hosts a hideous fun fair afterwards with cheap beer, expensive rides and undercooked hotdogs. We avoid this part like the plague!
So.....what do you do?
Here in the UK, trick or treating is beginning to get more popular with little kids, although thank goodness the menace of scary teenagers demanding money instead of sweets after 9pm seems to have stopped. My kids like to dress up and we knock on friends' doors but Halloween is severely stricted to Oct 31st only, lasts for about a grand total of 1½ hrs and doesn't involve dressing the house up weeks in advance like Christmas.
What we're all waiting for here in Britain is Guy Fawke's Night on Nov 5th - when we celebrate the foiling of a Catholic plot to blow up parliament in 1604. There's nothing like a nice modern festival - and this is nothing like a nice modern festival :hurt:
We have fireworks and a big bonfire although very few now have a Guy sitting on the top to be burnt as the symbolism is just a little too real. Of course, being November, it frequently rains but the bonfires are usually that big that they can cope with this. When I was a child lots of people had their own back yard fireworks parties but there were so many accidents and public announcement programmes against this that these days most councils put on a display so everyone troops off to their local park to watch. It's also dark by 5.30 or so by then, so this is definitely a family thing, although my local park also hosts a hideous fun fair afterwards with cheap beer, expensive rides and undercooked hotdogs. We avoid this part like the plague!
So.....what do you do?
