Anyone celebrating ?
Some interesting info here re Halloween, All Saints, All Souls and Mischief Night.

http://projectbritain.com/year/november.htm

Don't forget the candle and leaving some food out on All Souls.

Not celebrating as such, will just be up and down like a jack-in-a-box answering the door to the stream of local kids Trick or Treating. We have our supply of sweets in! There are lots of posters up around town advertising various Halloween party events, my health club are having one but I won't be going!

It was raining hard last night and we were churlishly rather hoping that it might do tonight as well so as to keep them indoors, but no such luck, it is fine!

Nope I am Scottish and do not do American traditions nor am I Catholic/religious. As a child I dooked for apples and ate treacle scones dripping from the pulley in the kitchen, great fun. On bonfire night we sometimes went to a local bonfire where we had hot soup and a baked tattie and few sparklers and fireworks.

Great link Dick

Which is ironic when you consider even the name Halloween is Scottish and it was and always has been a pagan celebration.



Same as Christmas, it always makes me laugh when Atheists bleat on about not celebrating Christmas because they hate Christianity.... you honestly could not get more pagan than Christmas in fact the ONLY element about Christmas that is Christian is the Jesus element, the rest is ALL pagan.

And Easter of course

Christianity simply took over the pagan celebrations. I am 100% non-religious but still celebrate Christmas and do not feel like a hypocrite at all!

Yeah, Easter is a harder one to pinpoint though isn't it? Its essentially right, Christianity jumped on an Anglo Saxon goddess but for one Passover already existed prior to Christianity and wouldn't really have had any impact on Ancient Britain and secondly there is some question over whether Eostra was actually the Goddess or just made up by a contemporary writer but the practice of hijacking previous religions, usually the losing ones, is well known. Islam did it at Mecca, the Kaaba at Mecca was a shrine to the 360 gods worshiped by pre Islamic tribes, the list is endless.

Whatever their origin the whole lot has been hi-jacked by commercialism.

As a child I don't remember anyone celebrating Halloween. Now the shops are full of c**p you are supposed to buy.

All I'll be celebrating tonight is getting our power back after a 12 hour cut.

well we didnt get a single knock on the door and the dog was waiting to let rip

Sad news - 3 young women killed in a stampede at a Halloween party in Madrid

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20166315

not their fault but it is someones as it is an arena with a licence for 10,000

"There was a human crush at the only exit they had because the others were sealed off," a partygoer - who gave her name as Sandra - told Spain's Cadena Ser radio station.

Lucky you! It was crazy for us between 7 and 8 pm (I swear they started earlier this year) but tailed off a bit after that. Some of the naughtier ones come back more than once, I let them get away with 2 goes for their cheek but then say no more! We know them by name so it's easy to say "Miguelito, that's the second lot you've had, don't come back again!". Our last callers came just before 10pm, that was a large group with very swish costumes, accompanied by a group of parents. I think it was an organised thing, probably from a local guarderia. Some of the parents took photos of us outside the house with the kids so we are probably featuring on Facebook somewhere this morning, but as I don't have an account I'll never know.

You will just have to eat all the sweets yourself!

Some asshole let off a firework which caused a stampede when everyone tried to exit through the same door. The police are saying the other exits weren't sealed off, but there may have been too many tickets sold so the venue was over capacity.

There's a good illustration here showing what happened.

I don't remember either, and certainly not in Spain. When we were in Holland during Halloween they made a big thing of it. All the street decorated outside their houses, pumpkins etc. ad a prize for the best one. The New York parade is fab. Really large and a lot of satire, mostly put on by the Gay community...good fun. We didn't get any callers, not that sort of area.

Sorry to be a party pooper, but whilst Halloween has its advocates who state "it's only a bit of harmless fun", there is nevertheless a darker side to it. Essentially it's celebrating "magic, witchcraft, occult" or similar, whose consequences are anything but harmless & I think it worth mentioning.

We play with it at our peril. Essentially it is anti-Christian. For those who don't want to know the Christian message, fine. We're all grown up enough to choose.