Halloween Feature: Thoughts on Halloween

Today as part of my Halloween feature I have the very very lovely Laura Lovelock with her thoughts on why she does not like Halloween!

Why I’ve Never Liked Halloween

Whose idea was it to have a celebration based around scary things? Ok, granted, the main idea behind Halloween isn’t to dress up in scary costumes and beg for sweets, but that is what it has mainly become, isn’t it? If you go up to a child who is trick or treating and ask them what the original idea behind Halloween was, they wouldn’t be able to tell you; I didn’t even know what it was a celebration of until I just googled it.
To me, Halloween evokes memories of being scared on Halloween evenings, not daring to look out of my bedroom window in case a scary ghost or dead person would jump up against my window. I never went trick or treating and never had the urge to; I could think of better things to do than walk along dark streets, knocking on people’s doors. Maybe, it’s just because of my naturally scaredy-cat nature that I’ve never been a big fan of Halloween, but I think we need to re-evaluate why we celebrate Halloween.
Like many religious festivals, e.g. Christmas, Easter, companies and huge retailers jump upon the ideas and see them as a huge source of revenue. When do you walk into Tesco or Asda and see them spreading the real message of Easter? You don’t, do you? All you see is shelves stacked to the ceiling with chocolate eggs, fluffy bunnies, bottles of wine. Same at Christmas, gone is the real message behind it and in its place, copious gifts, a pressure on people to spend money and a generation of children who see Christmas as a chance to get everything they really want. To me, Halloween has just turned into another one of these festivals. Shops provide costumes and sweets for children and adults yet they again fail to portray the main message behind Halloween.
Then, because there is a large amount of promotion of the event, people then try to out-do each other by trying to have better costumes or have more expensive sweets or throw the best parties and then we just end up with a day of the year that is not based around any tradition, instead it’s based around being the scariest or being the best at Halloween.
So as well as the scary stuff which gives me the biggest shivers (!) I think Halloween is an over rated celebration. Carving pumpkins is harmless fun, so is apple bobbing but making people jump, scaring little children and giving out sweets to people is just not so great.
I hope everyone has an awesome Halloween trick and treating, eating toffee apples, scaring each other and carving pumpkins, but me, I’ll be snuggled up in bed with my light on and a book in my hand! No unnecessary scaring for me this year thank you!


Thank you Laura for stopping by my blog! Some very valid points there! I must say I do enjoy carving a pumpkin for Halloween and the little kids that come trick or treating, but maybe that's the less scary part ;).

Where you can find Laura:

Blog: http://shelovestoread.weebly.com/
Twitter: @_shelovestoread