Note to media
Can I please have my birthday back? It's bad enough that I can't even talk to my parents because they have no power and no cell service, and that a lot of the places I remember from my childhood are gone, but the total cancelling of Halloween is making me feel really depressed. If you have a holiday birthday, maybe you'll understand. You get so identified with that day as your birthday that you really can't separate the two.
Now the media is making such a huge connection WITH Halloween "this year is truly scary, destruction and death, no candy for small children, we will always remember this day," that it feels like "Happy fucking birthday, Prof. It's been cancelled, so all you get is old. Plus it will now be the new 9/11. And the beach you played on with your niece and nephew, the pier where your Grandpa used to take you, and the restaurant you went to with you parents are pulverized."
Sooo---Happy Fucking Birthday to me. *pops champagne and pours it down the toilet."
EDIT: Oh, yes, and the posts saying "it's time to end this useless holiday," and complaints about how it's too long and now adults are taking it over:
1. Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead is thousands of years old--at least two, anyway--and the Church in Britain had the good sense to say, "you know? You go ahead with that thing." It's the time of year halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, the time well after the harvests are all in and things get darker and colder and shit gets real.
It's also supposed to be at least three days long: October 31st, November 1st, November 2nd--as my Mexican and Mexican-American students would be happy to tell you.
2. The candy and the children and the fun stuff? That's the part that's new. Not that I have a problem with it; it's great. If costumes and candy distract evil spirits, that's fabulous. Halloween, though, is primarily srz bzns. (And also a ton of fun.)
3. The fact that it's also become a gay national holiday in some places--high five.
If this were Christmas, the airwaves would be bent out of shape on the prospect of getting rid of it. Sheesh.
Now the media is making such a huge connection WITH Halloween "this year is truly scary, destruction and death, no candy for small children, we will always remember this day," that it feels like "Happy fucking birthday, Prof. It's been cancelled, so all you get is old. Plus it will now be the new 9/11. And the beach you played on with your niece and nephew, the pier where your Grandpa used to take you, and the restaurant you went to with you parents are pulverized."
Sooo---Happy Fucking Birthday to me. *pops champagne and pours it down the toilet."
EDIT: Oh, yes, and the posts saying "it's time to end this useless holiday," and complaints about how it's too long and now adults are taking it over:
1. Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead is thousands of years old--at least two, anyway--and the Church in Britain had the good sense to say, "you know? You go ahead with that thing." It's the time of year halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, the time well after the harvests are all in and things get darker and colder and shit gets real.
It's also supposed to be at least three days long: October 31st, November 1st, November 2nd--as my Mexican and Mexican-American students would be happy to tell you.
2. The candy and the children and the fun stuff? That's the part that's new. Not that I have a problem with it; it's great. If costumes and candy distract evil spirits, that's fabulous. Halloween, though, is primarily srz bzns. (And also a ton of fun.)
3. The fact that it's also become a gay national holiday in some places--high five.
If this were Christmas, the airwaves would be bent out of shape on the prospect of getting rid of it. Sheesh.