Happy Halloween!!!!
- Thread starter Mike Edge
- Start date
Mike Edge
Well-known member
You must not have kids yet then.. It's such a fun holiday for the young whippersnappers.
jauburn
Well-known member
My take is that it's really about marketing and money. Halloween "spending" is up exponentially from when I was a kid. The numbers are astonishing. I'd send you a link or two, but all the links I could find are preceded by full-page timer ads. I refuse to support such sites. More money at work...
Call me a curmudgeon, but my favorite times of year are when everyone else is out "celebrating" their mandatory happy times (preceded by the stress of "getting ready"), and I'm free of them. Halloween is an especially bad retail joke because parents and others get the stress of getting ready, but they don't get any time off to celebrate--it's not a holiday.
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EQnoble
Well-known member
Halloween is the one holiday where neighbors are out and about and acting like a community, making sure people are being safe and keeping an eye out for their fellow citizens, slowing traffic and some folks even start up a campfire so they can stay outside and help keep things smooth in the neighborhood. There is even one family around here that does "big kid" Halloween and offers parents coffee, warm cider and beer for their hike.
In my neighborhood it was slow this year (about 175-225 kids knocking this go around) though we used to buy $100+ worth of candy and would run out hours before folks were done sugar mining.
In my neighborhood it was slow this year (about 175-225 kids knocking this go around) though we used to buy $100+ worth of candy and would run out hours before folks were done sugar mining.
Lisa
Well-known member
Halloween is my favourite holiday, but yeah most of the UK just don't get into the fun of it, which is a shame.
This year we went to Drayton Manor for the day - they had a fab firework display in the evening set to the Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Excellent day was had by all
Martok
Well-known member
That's probably because of the groups of youths who go around that are unpleasant if they don't get anything when they knock, or throw eggs and flour etc no matter what. The attitude of those who 'trick or treat' in the UK is probably not the same as that in the US.
I also don't get Halloween from another perspective. For the rest of the year children are told not to speak to strangers or to take sweets from them, yet on Halloween it's OK for them to knock on strangers' doors and accept sweets from them. Talk about giving kids mixed messages.
Lisa
Well-known member
Thankfully, the village I live in is small (300 houses) and everyone knows everyone so there are no strangers. I also only take the kids to those houses who I know are taking part in any halloween festivities.
EQnoble
Well-known member
Kids used to go egging here, until they started a per egg fine for those carried on Halloween (sometime near the end of my youth) and they straight up don't play around with it here like it's a small thing...reckless people intending damage and losses of in the very least the time it takes to clean up the mess. After some time of enforcing the idea that random acts of destruction are not OK kids in general calmed down and it hasn't been an issue really since (again this is my local area, don't know about the rest of the US) and it's back to how it should be, shut your front lights off if you don't want to be disturbed on the day and people move on to the next house.
From another point of view...the people who have their lights on during Halloween are probably not likely to turn your children away in an emergency and it promotes not being blind to other people around you, good bad or ugly you have neighbors and sometimes it's nice to have a reason to engage with them on a matter other than the classic 'get your dog off my lawn' type of stuff.
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