The Queen is coming to town tomorrow and the whole place has been a flurry of activity for the past week and a half.  Thousands of people are going to be bussed in to crowd the market square and line the streets, all so an old lady can ride through the town, dedicate a sundial and ride away. 

It must be odd being Queen; she must believe that the entire country is decked out in red, white and blue bunting, festooned with flowers, populated by smiling, happy people and smells of fresh paint.  But that's not what I want to talk about; I want to talk about the disturbing trend of the British stealing our holidays. 

Have a look at this:  

It might not be Thanksgiving as we know it, but I think it's obvious where the idea came from.

The problem with usurping another culture's holidays is that you only get the outer trappings and tend to miss the underlying traditions, which is why the growing trend of inflicting Halloween on the populous over here is drawing criticism.

Halloween in Britain is wrong on so many levels.  First and foremost, they have a perfectly adequate autumn holiday of their own only 5 days after Halloween called Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Day, featuring raucous celebrations, effigy burnings, mischief (or vandalism, depending on your point of view) and fireworks.  Okay, so there's no candy, but they could use some of their 'Guy' money for that if they really wanted to. 

And this leads into the second reason they shouldn't have Halloween here; they have no idea how to celebrate it. 

For Guy Fawkes Day, it is traditional--during the two or three weeks preceding it--for kids make up a dummy representing Guy Fawkes and sit on street corners with it asking passers-by, "A penny for the Guy?" 

The idea is to buy fireworks and other burnable materials to set alight on Bonfire Night upon which their dummies, or effigies, of Guy Fawkes, are burned.  This is all well and good; I love traditions and have no qualms about tossing 50 pence into their begging bowls.  The locals deal with it as well, but tend to grumble a bit more because, "back in my day, we had better dummies, not a Manchester United sweatshirt stuffed with leaves and topped off with a Bart Simpson mask!" 

I guess their fear is that soon this holiday tradition will be reduced to delinquents holding an old sock and accosting pedestrians with, "spare change for the Guy?" 

The rather seasonal nature of Guy Fawkes day seems to have been transferred to their idea of Halloween, making for a decidedly confusing and hybrid version of this autumnal American tradition.  Children over here, I am told, start repeatedly frisking their neighbors for candy as early as the middle of October, often wearing little more than their street clothes and a mask.  That's not Halloween, that's simply a shakedown.  This is why many people here are against the idea, and why the local police hand out signs to hang on your door that say, in effect, "Piss off you little bastards!" 

You can't just grab another country's holiday at random and expect to understand the nuances of how to celebrate it and I encourage them to give up on this Halloween idea; if the British want to take one of our holidays, they would be much better off with the 4th of July. 

This idea may seems sort of strange, but the war and its outcome are no surprise to the residents over here and it represents, after all, an excuse to get drunk, set off fireworks and, most importantly, have the day off from work. 

In England, the bank holidays fall in an unfortunate pattern.  After the Christmas-New Year-Easter run, they've got May Day and Whitsunday in May, and then nothing all summer long until Christmas.  Guy Fawkes Day, like our Halloween, doesn't give you the day off from work.  And here, they don't have Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving or even Election Day to provide a buffer between the waning days of summer and the Christmas season. 

This holiday drought stretches over so many weeks that they actually, arbitrarily, made up a bank holiday just so they could get a three-day weekend over the summer.  It's on the final weekend in August and is called, oddly enough, August Bank Holiday.  So, if they're going to borrow our holidays, they might be better off with ones that provided them a day off and fill in some gaps. 

Now, if instead of foisting Halloween off on a confused and unwilling pubic, they condensed that food festival into one special, gluttonous-orgy day and called it, I don't know, Thanksgiving, maybe, they'd be a little more balanced, holiday-wise, and you wouldn't find bewildered British kids wandering around in cheap masks ringing doorbells and saying, "Penny for the Gu . . ., uh, trick of treat!"

<=Prev     Home     Next=>