Tag: LEARN ENGLISH

For study until 3rd of November 2024

Subject: Halloween

Audio: On usual social media platforms.

It is Halloween and as usual my town has a parade which takes place on the closest weekend. Usually artists create a monster which looks like its hanging over the town hall, but as everything has gone digital, there isn’t actually anything to see unless you attend the event where monsters are beamed on to the walls of the town hall after it gets dark. It is kind of sad that there aren’t any installed monuments to visit anymore during the day. As movie makers say “It’s all in the can”.

I went to the town centre and was upset that there was really nothing to see. Preparations were well underway, complete with loudspeakers. They were loud enough to wake the dead if you excuse the pun. I don’t mind a bit of Kelly Clarkson but I take exception to Celine Dion. My opinion of her is so bad that I remove myself from conversations about her by saying:

“Oh, Celine Dion? My cat really, really doesn’t like her” – it seems the only way I can avoid being rude about her voice. The third person is really useful sometimes.

By preparations, I mean the roads were sealed off and large projectors were placed around the centre. The parade at night is nice to see but has too many people to make it in any way enjoyable.

When I was a kid, Halloween was one night in the year when we dressed up, carved turnips and painted pictures of witches. It didn’t extend to weeks of celebrations with horror movies about psychotic killers, there wasn’t a Halloween brand and any sense of fun associated with it was Disney style and harmless like the movie Hocus Pocus. There were always objections to it though particularly from Churches which still had a lot of influence in the 70s and 80s but most of us saw it as harmless fun. It didn’t extend beyond putting a sheet over your head and shouting “booo”. I think its popularity was because it was a shared experience and time honoured. My father carving the turnip, my mother making cookies and my grandparents buying sweets. These days the kids just go to the supermarket and stuff their faces full of whatever they can buy.

In more recent years as Religion seems to have dwindled, Halloween has become not only a brand but a much bigger celebration than Christmas. Houses with decorated windows, lights, pumpkins, scarecrows without heads and covered in blood which make them look putrid.

A group of kids turned up at my place last night looking for sweets and shouting “trick or treat”. The phrase “trick or treat” is a new phenomenon which we borrowed from America but it does represent what kids do on that night. They visit neighbours and ask for sweets. We don’t actually respond by choosing an option like “trick” we just give them sweets and then they leave.  In my case I use my video doorbell, see the costumes and just ignore them. Maybe I am a hard hearted Skype English Teacher but I prefer to be on Skype talking to people about how frightening learning English can be rather than talking to kids about how frightening they look.

A lot of people don’t like Halloween because of its darker connotations. I do know that 31^st October has always been associated with the dead and it is a night when the dead and the living supposedly can meet each other. It is kind of like the Day of the Dead in Mexico but we don’t leave gifts on graves for the dead, in fact we don’t even think of them. British people are not sentimental in that way, at least not on Halloween and we are far too mean to leave alcohol for dead people on their graves.

 The original idea back in the 17^th century is that if we dress up as ghosts, no one will know who is alive and who is dead,  offering some kind of protection on the night. Here in the UK we also have a number of people who are pagan or wiccan. Halloween for them is a religious observance akin to Christmas  and they are also becoming fashionable.  Halloween has long been associated with magic and as a child I do remember seeing things like dead chickens on graves and more recently farmers keeping their horses locked up on the night for fear that someone will cut off their tails, there has been a few police reports about that and on local media.  So it is clear that in the countryside there are people around practicing some kind of magic on that night but nobody knows who they are or why.

I did feel a little bit disturbed when I was in the supermarket and the assistant was dressed as an old hag. As her face was hidden, I couldn’t see who she was or her facial expressions and that made me a bit uncomfortable. But it’s no worse I suppose than dressing up as Santa Claus or people wearing covid masks.

My feelings towards Halloween are rather ambivalent, I don’t like the costumes but I suppose there’s no real harm.  

I had a discussion with my neighbour about this:

“Are you all set for Halloween?” He muttered wryly.

“What do you mean all set?” I asked, trying to disarm his vain attempt at humour,

“I mean do you have the sweets ready?” was his next attempt at small talk.

“Um, no…… I don’t.. I don’t really…..” but by that point he had walked off, reminding me again that this was only small talk and I shouldn’t be thinking about answering well.

Strangely he had the same conversation with me at Christmas time, its just their way of making conversation about nothing but when they don’t get the answers they want the conversation simply dies. It does make me wonder though what makes other people excited and how they lead their lives. I had a pang of sadness that  I might be  missing out on something, spending most of my days online. I mean there could be elephants dressed as witches living next door all the year round and I likely wouldn’t notice.

The clocks change by one hour around the same time as Halloween, I use the American proverb to remind me which way they change:

Spring Forward ( In Spring they go forward).

Fall Back (In Autumn they go back, Autum is the British word for Fall).

Once a big deal, now that’s automated as well. I wonder if people in the future will even realise these things take place?