HALLOWEEN AND OTHER CELEBRATIONS.
We’ve
just gotten over Halloween, or as it started out, All Hallows Eve, and according
to Wikipedia, it’s a yearly celebration observed in a number of countries on 31
October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins
the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to
remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful
departed believers. For many of us, our
children and grandchildren experience it as a night for gathering as much candy
and other goodies as possible. We used
to say “trick or treat”, but nobody ever tricked, at least no one that I can
remember. My friends and I didn’t need
any sort of holiday or reason to trick someone, and we had some really good
ones.
There was the phantom knock on
the door and the barricaded street…they were the two most popular because they
were the easiest to do with the best results.
The
phantom knock on the door went like this…at night you looked for a front door
that had a knocker on it. Tie some
black fishing line to the door, wind it
around a tree and sit on the front steps of a house next to your target. A couple of pulls on the line and the knocker
tells the people inside that someone is at the front door…but when they open
the door there’s no one there. They
close the door and then you repeat the trick…it’s usually good for at least
two, and sometimes three times.
The
barricaded street was really an illusion, and again it was at night. Two or three kids on each side of the street
would wait until a car came along and then they would mimic pulling on some
sort of a barricade…like a rope or a cable.
The driver would see what he thought was a barricade and come to a
screeching halt. Then we all ran away to
wait for the next car. Good clean fun
and no messy cleanup as might be involved in toilet-papering a tree or a
house…and that was just a waste of money too.
Again,
from Wikipedia, there’s this…Walpurgis Night is the English
translation of Walpurgisnacht, one of the German names for the night of 30
April, so called because it is the eve of the feast day of Saint Walpurga, an
8th-century abbess in Germania. In Germanic folklore Walpurgisnacht, also
called Hexennacht literally "Witches' Night", is believed to be the
night of a witches' meeting on the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz
Mountains, a range of wooded hills in central Germany between the rivers Weser
and Elbe. The first known written occurrence of the English translation
'Walpurgis Night' is from the 19th century.
Local variants of Walpurgis Night
are observed across Europe in the Netherlands,
Germany, the Czech Republic,
Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia,
Finland and Estonia. In the United States, Walpurgisnacht
is one of the major holidays celebrated within LaVeyan Satanism and is the
anniversary of the founding of the Church
of Satan.
France has a liberation
day, much like our 4th of July, with some similarities. Both of our countries sought to remove
themselves from the tyranny of a king.
We had George and they had Louis.
Bastille Day, symbolizes the end of the constitutional monarchy, and the
beginning of the democratic republic
of France. There again, both countries went to a
republic rather than a democracy and if you don’t know the difference, well,
that’s for another time. On July 14,
1789, in France, there was an uprising against
the constitutional monarchy. The Bastille
was actually a prison, and it was a symbol of the monarchy. The people wanted a reconciliation for all
of France,
to promote unity, and purse liberty from the monarchy.
As
reported in the Huffington Post on April 7th, 2014, Each spring,
people flock to Kawasaki, Japan, to celebrate Kanamara
Matsuri, aka the "Festival of the Steel Phallus."
The festival is a celebration of the penis and
fertility. People parade gigantic phallic-shaped mikoshi (portable Shinto
shrines) down the streets during the event, as revelers suck on penis
lollipops, buy penis-themed memorabilia and pose with sculptures in the shape
of -- you guessed it -- penises. According
to the BBC, the festival is believed to have roots in the 17th century, when
prostitutes are said to have prayed for protection from sexually transmitted
infections at Kawasaki's
Kanamara shrine. Today, the festival
reportedly raises awareness about safe sex practices and fundraises for HIV
prevention.
May
17th, in Norway,
is their Constitution Day. The
Constitution of Norway was signed at Eidsvoll on May 17 in the year 1814. The
constitution declared Norway
to be an independent kingdom in an attempt to avoid being ceded to Sweden after
Denmark–Norway's devastating defeat in the Napoleonic Wars. Once again, sort of, it was a move away from
a king to a democracy. By historical
coincidence, the Second World War ended in Norway nine days before that year's
Constitution Day, on May 8, 1945. You see, then, that there are happy
occasions, occasions of war and remembrance, and some just silly ones. Whatever the reason, a person can always
find something to celebrate, somewhere in the world, so enjoy!
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