Halloween

Subject: Halloween

The festival of Halloween on the 31st proceeds the 1st of November "All Saints Day". All Saints is a celebration as the name states of All Saints, whilst Halloween, originally a Celtic, festival celebrates the ousting of spirits.

Given that 'Saintly Spirits' should be venerated and non saintly ones cast out it leads one to understand the complexity of the medieval mind and practice.

Today Halloween has developed into simply, 'trick and treating' and the carving of masks and lanterns from pumpkins. Children knock on your door (with parents in the background) and ask for a treat, usually sweets and the occasional coin. 

It's a community thing, the kids come from across the road or next door, never too far away. The fascination is the expectancy of what they might receive and the slightly longer leash the children are given to knock on a door in the first place.

I for my part raid the sweet isle in Sainsbury's and settle a few sweets of different flavours and shapes into a small bag to hand over at the door to each child, feigning fear at their painted expectant faces as they wait patently for their treat. A bit of kidding, a smile to Mum in the background and they are gone for another year or, because they grow up, become like their parents sceptical and find they have no time for this children's stuff.

This year the "prohibitionists" are calling for a stop to dressing up and blackening their faces as being disrespectful to the black community. 

First it was the Black and White Minstrels, and then the Roberson Jam 'Golliwogg'  now its Halloween.

How do these people live with themselves seeing a slight in everything. Always on call to disburse white people of their innocence, they drag up relevance where there is none.

The blackening or the disguising of the face is meant to be part of the fun and to use black on a white face is not to show disrespect to people with black faces but as the soldier going out on a nighttime petrol, it's as a disguise. 

When will these sad buggers grow up and understand that as a white person living in what can be described as a 'black country' one has to adapt their thinking and so with a black person living in a predominantly white country, the odds are that some things will accentuate the culture and preference of the native.  We continually trade off these statements of culture and practice in which ever country you choose to settle against an overall benefit of being there. The last thing I would wish is for a country into which I had voluntary moved and called home, to insist it conformed  to my own blinkered assumption of what is right or wrong.