Better look out… a crayon doesn’t sound very godly to me…
Well, when I ran with the metalhead satanist types (not the Crowley ‘We Don’t Really Believe in Satan but using His Name for our Brand of Hedonism Gets Us Attention’ Satanists) Halloween was a pretty big day for them. You could be pretty sure that at least a few of them were trying some kind of bizarre ritual that night. Weird group…some of them actually believe in what they say and do, but most of them just play along because it’s cool and it makes them feel like they are part of something. I was a hard atheist at the time, but I made up my own little cult for my friends with ideas lifted from Dante, Milton, and Lovecraft. One of my ‘recruits’ kept it going after I lost interest, and ended up doing some fucked up shit (slaughtering an attic full of pigeons in an abandoned building, raping and stabbing to death a German Shepherd).
Welcome to the Boards G Odoreida. I think you’ll be most acceptable.
Now would you kindly state clearly whether it’s in or out?
Thank you
Redboss
Thank you, Redboss. Do you ever read your newspaper cuttings? - rather amusing.
Or, as the Bard put it: “Dost think that because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Go on! Fine a reference in teh bible that talks against crayons! Just try!
Personally, I find crayons to be verrrry scaarry… especially the red ones (bloody), the black ones (pretty sure they are Satanic), and the green ones (symbolic of illness and rot). I suggest dressing up your child as a plain white (virtuous) crayon. Or better yet… a pencil.
A pencil??? You want the kid do die of lead poisoning or what? 
My Mom, who was a child in a heavily (but not exclusively) Irish neighborhood in Indianapolis in the 1920s, talks about going Trick-or-Treat-ing in a way reminiscent of guising. They went door to door begging treats, but were often greeted with, “Here’s your treat, now let’s see your trick.”
My memory of the whole “Satanic” bit is that it seems to have arisen in the 1970s. Along with the whole “Moral Majority” schtick was an increase in “Discovering Satan in the World,” in which everything not found in their interpretation of the Bible was deemed to have come from Satan. This led to a lot of parents in the 70s and later who had happily gone trick-or-treating, themselves, in the 1940s through the 1960s suddenly choosing to deny their children the same fun because “it was Satanic.”
(The rise of Wiccan and neo-Paganism didn’t help matters in this regard. Both the aforementioned linking of all non-Christian beliefs to Satanism and the sloppy use by Wiccans of the word “witch,” reinforced the idea that had taken hold–further reinforced by the idea that only dirty, immoral hippies would indulge in Wicca or its cousin beliefs.)
I have kids, like some here. I say it is harmless. Kids really get into it, and I like to see them come to the door. Some are really quite clever in their get up!! I’m just a kid at heart I guess.
My Christian friends who don’t like its pagan roots have done a good job, I think, sticking to their beliefs while not denying their kids the fun. They avoid decorations and costumes that (to them) are related to the Occult–such as witches, devils, etc. But their kids have costumes and go trick-or-treating. I know they talk about this with their kids.
My friend (a good protestant) also says they could always celebrate it as the day when Martin Luther nailed those articles to the church door. 
I’m planning to dress as a witch when we take my son around, but I’ll probably leave the hat and cape in the car if we go to their house. It’s the least I can do, given that I rarely if ever tone down my foul mouth in front of them.
Stranger things have happened. It is also an anachronistic assumption to think that such distortions could only occur through ‘commercial pressure’.
What this discussion has so far failed appreciate is that the subject of folk traditions was extremely fashionable throughout the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. Discussions about it took place widely in print. Read any local antiquarian journal of the period or browse through any Victorian newspaper and you will find them stuffed with articles on the subject. By the mid-nineteenth century knowledge of folklore had ceased to be exclusively or even primarily oral. People knew about oral traditions because they read about them, whether in books, newspapers or Thomas Hardy. This was knowledge limited only by the circulation patterns of these publications, in other words, the whole of the British Empire and North America. This was both a benefit and a problem. The exhaustive recording of these traditions obviously created a major resource for subsequent historians; the downside is that the process of recording and publicising these traditions distorted them.
Few would now accept that such recording could ever be a wholly neutral process. Present-day oral historians are acutely aware that what they record can owe more to their own preconceptions. Their nineteenth-century predecessors, who were less aware of these dangers, usually made three confident assumptions and those three assumptions have been just as evident in this thread: (1) oral traditions are probably very ancient, (2) traditions from separate localities are likely to be interrelated, having derived from a common source - the more distant the localities, the more ancient the source, and (3) that this common source was probably ‘Celtic’. The unintentional but recurring temptation was to disregard what would now be considered good scholarly practice. The choice of which material to record was often determined by the aim of proving or supporting these assumptions. What they found was then interpreted by them in the light of those assumptions, often using what would now be considered unrelated evidence for comparative purposes. Worst of all, what they published sometimes influenced or even created traditions elsewhere. The belief that a published tradition was more ancient or purer than an unpublished alternative could easily change forever the way in which the unpublished tradition was remembered. Most academic historians of British folklore now accept that no ‘oral’ tradition known from the late nineteenth century or later can be accepted at face value. Each of them must be considered suspect unless earlier evidence can be provided.
This is not a counsel of despair. A vast amount of archival research has been undertaken in recent decades by historians interested in the folk cultures of the British Isles in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. Sensitive scholarship can uncover much more than you might suppose. The picture that has emerged confirms the view that later oral traditions are next to useless as a tool to uncover earlier traditions, even if the gap is no more than a couple of centuries. Oral tradition unsupported by institutional structures is inherently unstable. This matches the view of the distinguished historian of Ancient Greece, the late Sir Moses Finlay, that oral traditions in any culture usually become useless to historians after only three generations. (Oral traditions that preserve a specific text are a rather different matter.) The idea of pagan survivalism has also come to seem implausible; the folk cultures of pre-modern Britain were thoroughly Christian. This was true even of early-modern witchcraft, which is now seen as either an heretical subversion of Christianity or, more likely, the product of the imaginations of its Christian persecutors.
I don’t disagree with much that you’ve written, APB. Thomas Hardy wrote along similar lines about folk celebrations, pointing out that some were revivals and others had been handed down for at least a few generations. The ones that were recent revivals were often the only ones celebrated with any enthusiasm.
The reason I droned on for so long was because I thought you were using your cite to back up the apparent claim by you and Road Rash that Britain has no Hallowe’en traditions that have not come from America. I could not see how this cite was relevant, and I realise now it was aimed that the other discussion in this thread.
However without that cite, the only backing for your claim is your “awful feeling”, the fact that you are “very sceptical” and that “stranger things have happened”. No doubt they have, and you may be right about everything, but so far we’ve got no reason to believe you. The evidence that some of us have offered is anecdotal, but you haven’t offered any.
To be clear, all I’m saying is that while the contemporary face of Hallowe’en was being developed in the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries, having been taken there by immigrants probably from the British Isles, the people who remained in Britain and Ireland carried on with their own Hallowe’en traditions. These British and Irish traditions are different in various ways from what’s done in America. American Hallowe’en traditions have for the last decade or so been eclipsing our own ones but that does not mean that we all do things the way the Americans do.
I am not making any claims for where Hallowe’en comes from or how ancient it is. Nor am I being “romantic” when I mention Ireland; Scotland happens to be close to Ireland and there has always been cultural exchange of one type or other. The cite mentioned by Road Rash pretty much backs up most of what I’ve said.