Happy Halloween Month!
ChastMastr
Shipmate
in All Saints
For those who celebrate Halloween and the “spooky season” (this is a thread for people who like and enjoy it, not about disliking it, please), what are people doing this year? Anyone watching spooky movies, or decorating, eating themed snacks, or the like yet? (Of course, some of us do some of these things all the time…) Any plans for the more spiritual aspects of Dia de Los Muertos/All Saints’ Day/All Souls’ Day?
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https://youtu.be/kUfN-m07VKw?is=zzDeoJi8hoPyuUqD
At least our local Tesco's Hallowe'en tat aisle is in the correct liturgical colours (orange and black).
Beistle’s stuff goes back to the 1920s! And they use the same patterns now, so you can get decorations that are the same as their oldest stuff!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beistle_Company
Mannheim Steamroller’s Halloween albums:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kFOee3Nim5zwyL_JVU0ZB1OW9StszDEUg&si=kshHHqcoh_KhPoFZ
Never mind Hallowe'en - All Hail The Great Pumpkin™! Make sure your own pumpkin patch is entirely sincere, and He may grace you with His presence.
We don't decorate, although many of the local houses get rather elaborate. My one job is to acquire some sort of candy to distribute to the 30-or-so kids that come by. My favorites are candy canes and bubblegum.
Oh I am doing this for sure.
The Great Pumpkin™ will not be pleased. It all sounds most insincere.
Wouldn’t that be more green and yellow, rather than orange and black?
https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Loki
Allhallowtide does last after October 31, but only two days more, so All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allhallowtide
After that, I basically start preparing for (American) Thanksgiving, which I treat mainly as our harvest festival, but that would be its own thread.
Our local Tesco is almost out of Pumpkins, as proof positive that this is Truth™...
No, @Pomona is right about that. Observances like Christmas Eve, Easter Even (as the BCP calls it) and All Hallow’s Eve are remnants of the Jewish understanding that the day begins at sundown. Traditionally, Christmas begins liturgically with Vespers on the 24th. Christmas Eve, liturgically speaking, is Christmas.
That’s also the understanding underlying the Paschal Triduum. Liturgically speaking, the first of the “Three Days” begins on the evening of Maundy Thursday and ends at the end of the afternoon of Good Friday (reflecting that under Jewish understanding, the Last Supper and the crucifixion happened on the same day), the second day begins on Good Friday evening and last until the end of the afternoon of Holy Saturday, and the third day—the day of Resurrection”—begins on the evening of Holy Saturday and ends with the start of Sunday evening.
/Tangent
For Allhallowtide and whether it includes October 31, again, I point you to the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allhallowtide
(And of course various of our Pagan friends celebrate Samhain...)
The Episcopal service for All Hallows' Eve is on page 141 of the Book of Occasional Services.
https://www.episcopalcommonprayer.org/uploads/1/2/9/8/129843103/book_of_occasional_services_final.pdf
Here is more on Hallowtide from a Roman Catholic perspective:
https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2019/09/all-hallows-eve-halloween-in.html
That said, I will slightly amend what I said earlier, after going back to look at recent posts. I stand by my position that historically/traditionally, the “Eve” is part of the feast or observance that follows the next day. But contrary to what @Pomona said above, that does not mean that “All Hallow's Eve is November 1st because liturgical days are from evening to evening.” It means that liturgical days are often reckoned differently from calendar days. Christmas is December 25th; December 24th is not Christmas. But liturgically, the celebration of Christmas begins the evening of December 24th.
Regarding the other matter, I think “we will have to disagree on X” is a standard turn of phrase when people don’t agree with each other on X, isn’t it?
/tangent
I’ve never seen it that way at all, myself. And yes, I certainly didn’t mean it in any kind of passive-aggressive way. It’s just the way I talk/write.
I've often thought this as well, but don't stop being yourself, @ChastMastr.
I'm looking forward to our annual viewing of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," and we have a number of spooky movies in the queue, though we never quite seem to get to them. I hate gore, so it's a Halloween list that's a bit more limited. I think I'm on my third bag of candy corn for the season (which will continue through American Thanksgiving), and our Halloween/Harvest decorations are up and have been since the beginning of October.
I want to recommend an annual radio program for Halloween Night broadcast by 90.9 WGUC Cincinnati called "Tunes From The Crypt," which is a wonderful playlist of spooky classical favorites we tune into every year.
I love Halloween. It's in a virtual tie with Christmas as my favorite holiday.
But Hallowtide doesn't start on the first of October, was more my point.
That’s fine. I didn’t call it Hallowtide. I called it Halloween month.
Ditto! For me, October begins the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s period, which is all together my favorite part of the year. It’s also when things start cooling down here in Tampa Bay, Florida (today a high of 85 degrees F and a low of 69… which Siri tells me are 29 and 21 Celsius, respectively… I still wish it was cooler… I have often had to have the air conditioning on on Christmas Day!).
I’ve been playing appropriate music on YouTube, like Mannheim Steamroller’s Halloween albums, Parry Gripp’s Halloween/spooky songs (“Ghost Slug,” “Haunted Cupcake,” etc. because he’s just delightfully weird—he’s the guy who did the “It’s Raining Tacos” saga of something like nine songs in the series (“It’s Hailing Taquitos,” “Churros from Space,” “Guacamole Tsunami,” “It’s Raining Tacos Again,” etc.). Still need to put up my Beistle cardboard decorations!
Mine too, though there are few if any Christmas (as opposed to Advent) decorations at our house until at least the second week of December. I’m particularly fond of Thanksgiving.
Other than advent candles, and possibly a nativity set that doesn’t yet have the baby Jesus put in it until Christmas Eve, I’m intrigued about what advent decorations one might have.
I have heard of some people taking the figures of the three wise men and moving them closer and closer to the nativity set until epiphany, which is kind of a neat idea.
I want to put up at least some Christmas decorations properly this year. I kind of am bad at… Lots and lots of things actually in terms of getting things done on time. Although with a new mentoring figure in my life who is helping me with lots of that kind of thing, maybe I will succeed this year. Honestly, the two Halloween plastic pumpkin things that light up that are in the bedroom… Have been there all year since last year. And actually from the year before that as well. During the 2024 hurricanes when I lost power, one of the plastic pumpkins was kind of the main source of light in the bedroom at night. Behind them is a boxed LED menorah that lights up (I am afraid to have anything with actual candles because of the cats) that has remained in its box ever since I bought it like… Last year? The year before? And hopefully this year, I will actually use it?
I still want to set up my little universal monsters action figures from super seven as a little additional Halloween decoration.
I did watch the latest Phineas and Ferb Halloween episode that just came out over brunch a few minutes ago.
I should note that our daughter has a birthday two weeks before Christmas. When she was growing up, we always gave her the choice of whether the house should be decorated for Christmas prior to her birthday, or whether that should wait until after. While she chose “before” a few times, it was usually “after,” which would have been my choice. And since we like to leave the tree up until Epiphany, and since we have a live tree, putting it up too long before Christmas doesn’t really work.
We do that. But as with other Christmas decorations, we don’t put the crèche out until a few days before Christmas.
Eh, you probably don’t need to. It’s a sequel that didn’t need to get made. It’s meh at best.
Well, I’m still hoping…
Have you seen Mad Monster Party? It’s the Rankin-Bass stop-motion Halloween special, with an amazing cast…
Aw. No worries, then.
Have you seen the animated Halloween Tree, a Ray Bradbury adaptation? It’s on my list of things to watch…
When it comes to animation, it’s pretty much Looney Tunes/Chuck Jones, plus the Peanuts Halloween and Christmas specials, and that’s about it.
(I remember a "Bugs Bunny Howl-oween Special" that basically was an anthology of a bunch of those as a kid...)
(There are a bunch of Disney Mickey, Donald, etc, cartoons which have come out in recent years that have more of a Looney Tunes slapstick sensibility than the older stuff which you may like, over on Disney+, by the way. And of course the vintage stuff (Lonesome Ghosts, Trick or Treat, Ichabod) which has its own slapstick sensibility to it, but the recent Disney stuff is much more so.)
But I do like Witch Hazel, so there is that.
What about Gossamer? Poor Gossamer! But such an innnnnteresting monster…
https://youtu.be/WjC6joom_CE?feature=shared
And the vampire. Hocus Cadabra!
https://youtu.be/NoSVnc-7eTk?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/CCJ0D4pI0tI?is=2X-1Yp0vFJX4q4DN
They could combine them! Just imagine huge displays of the Nightmare Before Christmas, and— oh, wait.
Poor little Thanksgiving. It needs more love. But that can be its own thread.
(I’ve been seeing Christmas-flavored ice cream and stuff at my grocery store since late September, I think…)
I think at this point there’s an industry for everything. One thing that I’m not particularly a fan of is to see candies that are traditionally for one particular holiday that have now been re-themed for every other holiday. So now we have pastel Easter candy corn, Cadbury eggs for Halloween with green filling inside, marshmallow peeps for every single holiday, just in different colors and shapes, etc. I kind of liked the idea that there was regular or what was called “Indian“ candy corn*, which had a more interesting flavor to me, for Halloween, and marshmallow peeps and Cadbury eggs for Easter, and so on; in some cases, they literally just take the same exact thing without any changes and put it in a different wrapper, which I almost feel like is cheating.
* I think it’s now called “harvest” candy corn
The simplicity of it is part of the charm of it. Of course, putting the meal together may be anything but simple, but it’s something I really look forward to.