Hopped the border in peace today, to get my fireworks for Halloween. Seein as you lot like takin our petrol, I thought I'd liberate you's of some of your fireworks.

Got so much shit it's unbelievable. Some I'll be selling for a tidy profit, the rest will be going off in an irresponsible manner. God bless Holloween for givin me an excuse to set off explosives, and God bless the Brits for sellin me the explosives!

Anybody doin any crazy shit over Halloween?

Sl�n tamaill

I wish I was back on the Isle. Last Hallowe'en I was at Tulsk, in County Roscommon. After darkness fell we drove up to Cruachan Ai, the Hellgate, a deep cave where Morrigan herself lives and from where the forces of the Otherworld launch their annual attack against Tara on All Saints Eve. The cave mouth is just a pit in the ground, and muddy beyond description. We crawled into the cave which opens up quite a bit once you get deep inside, and spent around an hour there, most of it in complete darkness. Our teacher, a Mr. Daragh Smyth (published author and the guru on Irish mythology) gave a chant-like speech in his Irish. We also were fortunate to have Simon O'Dwyer with us to play a bronze age horn in the darkness, accompanied by his wife Maria on the bodhr�n. Later on we had a bonfire at the Cruachan Ai visitor center, but I wandered off across the road to an ancient looking graveyard.

Pumpkin lanterns just are not quite the same.

That sounds shit-hot.

Have to do that sometime.

Now that's the way to spend your Hallowe'en, fair play to you Werewolf. Love to do something like that myself.

But hey, if you haven't got a nearby faery mound or local sidhe population, do not fear! You can still scare the shit outta yourself on Hallowe'en, Celtic style!

All you have to do is head down to your parish church on Hallowe'en night, before midnight, and wait in the church porch, just outside the main doors. Anybody who does this is said to see the apparitions of those who will die in the parish during the next year walk up to the church entrance and knock on the doors.

But!

If you see your own apparition walk up and knock on the doors, it is said that you will become the "churchyard walker", the guardian of the graveyard, and will not be released until another person does what you did and sees his own apparition knocking on the doors...

Don't ask me where I get this shit! Well it was in a book I was reading about Celtic Mythology, so I ain't making it up. Might just be tempted to give it a shot this year...hmm...

Lol, fuck that.

I've got more important things than waste my life hangin around a graveyard for a trillion years til someone is stupid enough as I was.

I do not celebrate Halloween

Slan go foill

We have a great music fest here for a Halloween night. Bands playn' all night long, irish dance schools show themselves, reanactors are fightin' swords... AND THE WATERFALLS OF BEER!!!

It's a bit strange hey, Charlotte... Halloween came to America by European emigrants and then quasi dissapeared in Europe. Now Halloween is been exported by the Americans to the old continent and it's spreading everywhere!
When I was a kid of 12-16 years I only knew Halloween from celebrations in the US shown on television. Then sudden, by a commercial wind, Halloween was getting even to the smallest villages! Just five years ago... Suppose that's also globalisation.
What I'll do on Halloween: it's a friday and there will a lot of people in city, so I'll probably booze the evening away with mates Not on Guinness though! Not easy to find in average Belgian town... Only Irish Pub's in the main cities...

If I may correct you, it was not brought to US by all the European emigrants, only by Irish and British ones. Halloween is only settling down in France for a few years. I guess it's kinda the same in Belgium. A way for our shops to sell more...

Slan go foill

C'mon, whatever you call it - Halloween, Samhain, Navin Den' in Russian - that's the pagan hindo-european holliday when people were showing respect to their ancestors. Later it was mixed with a christian Day of all Saints.
So it can be celebrated everywhere in the world where descendants of the europeans live.

Well, it's not the same in France and over there. In France, it's only children annoying the whole building by ringing at the door and no one has any sweet to offer to them.

Slan go foill

lol Outta your whole block nobody has any sweets for the kids?!

Man, the French are a bunch of scroungers! No offence...

well someone in my building probably have some : a British family living at the 15th floor.
No offence taken, I hope to have access to Irish citizenship in a fair few years...

Slan go foill

Hmm, I would like to see one of those "events"...
Quite different to the continental America-like halloween...
I think it's quite boring around here: people, mostly children, dress up... Children go from house to house, asking for sweets (no problem here in Belgium that!) For adolescents and adults it's just another occasion to get pissed. No problem to me, that...

I was thinking as dressing up as a middle-age alchoholic and going door to door with an empty Guiness pint I saw a funny one this past weekend.... someone dressed up like Roy Horn (Sigfried and Roy) with his shirt all ripped up and a stuffed tiger hanging from his neck

That's sick...

...I like it!

Halloween actually has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from a contracted corruption of All Hallows Eve.

November 1, "All Hollows Day" (or "All Saints Day") is a Catholic day of observance in honour of saints. But, in the 5th century BC, in Celtic Britain, summer officially ended on October 31. The holiday was called Samhain (sow-en), the Celtic New year.

On the last day of the Celtic calendar the Celts believed that the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. The still living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes, to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all manners of ghoulish costumes and would noisily paraded around the neighbourhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away the spirits.

The Celtic tribes would then re-light their fires from a common source. The Druidic fire that was kept burning in the Middle of Ireland, was at Usinach. Similar locations were also present in other Celtic parts of Britain at the time.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Celts, but as a custom in the 9th century. This was called souling. On All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven.

British and primarily Irish immigrants brought the custom of Halloween to America in the 1840�s, initially to New England. The favourite prank at the time was to unhinge gates and doors.

Some cults may have adopted Halloween as their favourite "evil holiday," But the day itself did not grow out of evil practices. It grew out of the rituals of Celts celebrating a New Year, and out of medieval prayer rituals.

Today it has been commercialised and wrongly Americanised as a way of making money for shopkeepers and industry. But well, what the heck it is a great laugh. I will be in The Netherlands on the 31st. I am off to O�Caseys (An Irish/Expatriate bar in The Hague) to celebrate. Halloween is not the same in mainland europe as it is at home in the UK or Ireland. Still I am looking forward to a good night of drinking and loads of fun.