Pumpkin

31 Oct Pumpkin

Halloween is being marketed to us by corporations who want to sell mass produced synthetic costumes, plastic buckets, cheap chocolate grown where rainforests used to grow and sweets which encourage obesity. We are being sold images of this American confection through film, TV and social media. However, scratch the surface and you will find Samhain – the old Celtic festival to mark the end of harvest and the passage into winter. This has been celebrated for centuries on these isles. All Souls Day (the first of November) has been glued onto the old roots of this festival. I sense the profusion of “trick or treating” and dressing up in gothic styles as a response to our hunger for a connection with the circle of life and death. We yearn for a relationship with the ancestors – which we will soon be. Borrowing from the tradition of ‘Los Dios de los Muertos’, the ‘Day of the Dead’ in Mexico, a family film like ‘Coco’ (Pixar/Disney 2017) does just that in a way that includes children. “The English experience of death is apologetic. In Mexico it’s a celebration of the person who’s passed on.” (Stephen Wright, artist) After placing offerings for my ancestors, on Saturday I will be slipping on my skeleton suit and dancing at ‘Golden Delicious’.
http://www.rialtotheatre.co.uk/whats-on/events/golden-delicious-day-of-the-dead