Friday 30th October 2009, 03:00
Goodbyeween
It’s Halloween! Woo! But not for churches. Many have ‘Light’ events, to promote the flip side of Halloween, ie. to encourage young uns to not go out dabbling in the dark arts of Trick or Treating or the like. I fall somewhere between the two. I too am anti-Halloween, but for a different reason. It’s rubbish.
Does anyone really like it? It’s just there because it’s not quite Christmas and we need a reason for a party. But wait a week and you’ve got Fireworks Night. That’s great for a party. You get fireworks and everything – the clue’s in the name. But Halloween? I don’t want to answer the door to some acne-ridden oik with a cape round his shoulders, demanding in a voice that’s just broken today that we give him some sweets or he’ll spray foam over our car. Most of the time you either look at them trying to work out if they’re too old to be doing this (15 year olds trick-or-treating just comes across as threatening) or too young (either they’re on their own, in which case it feels weird, or their parents are with them, in which case you get the impression the kids don’t want to be there at all, but Mum made a costume specially).
I have the luxury of an evening job, so I’m delighted to say that I’ve made it my business to have a gig every October 31st that I can remember. Those trick-or-treaters will just find an empty house. Ha. But given that only this month a survey came out that the vast majority of UK householders don’t want carol-singers at their doors because it feels like home invasion, can we not also conclude that these people don’t want trick-or-treaters either? I shall be buying no sweets this year. If any kids come round a day early (I’ve seen that before – thus ruining my gig-booking scheme), they’ll be getting chopped-up bits of liver wrapped in Quality Street wrappers.
If this all sounds like a Halloween-based Scrooge, then we Brits only have ourselves to blame. The Americans do it and do it properly, but to the extent that it’s now a fancy dress party extraordinaire. And that goes beyond horror into Superman costumes and the like, and that I don’t mind so much. It’s the prospect of going out on October 31st to find a bunch of women dressed as ghoulish vamps with red juice running down their cheeks as they lollop zombiefied to the nearest pub that’s got a special drinks offer on. I’ve seen that all summer – they’re called hen dos, and they’re not pretty.
I applaud the churches in doing something different, even though ‘Light Services’ probably sound as painful to non-Christians as the words ‘secular funeral’ do to churchy types. The worry is that kids will go from Trick or Treat to Ouija boards in one easy step. While I don’t think that happens much, I can almost see why they would, just because, as I say, Halloween is so boring. You come back from Trick or Treat, you’ve listened to The Time Warp and The Monster Mash, you don’t know what else to do for the rest of the evening. Someone’s suggested a horror movie at the cinema to round off the night, but it’s only Saw VI and Halloween II, so even that’s a rubbish plan. You’ve got a whole week to wait till fireworks, so what else do you do? Out comes that most deadly of demonic boards: Monopoly. And then it all really kicks off as no one can quite remember the rules and suddenly Jon owns everything and he’s also the banker. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Then it all kicks off and then there’s real blood.
So yes, by all means have your Light services, good churches. But best of all, let’s hope Halloween and The Light Nights cancel each other out, and we can all get back to a nice normal Saturday night with The X Factor, a bottle of wine, and no annoying knocks at the door from feral kids that look like they want to burgle you.
Bah, humbug! (Wait a minute, that’s not a humbug – it’s a bit of liver wrapped as a humbug...)