GR Decides - Halloween or Guy Fawkes Night?

Moggy wrote:
Green Gecko wrote:This is probably the most pointless poll of all time down these parts.

You live in 1960s Alabama?

It's vaguely religious but no-one cares anymore. It's 17 burning crosses to represent 17 protestant martyrs who were hung over the bridge here and drowned by Catholics hundreds of years ago.

Everything else is WWII rememberer, vikings, zulus, grim reaper, superheroes, politicians, all kinds of gooseberry fool. Basically anyone you can dress up carrying a torch and throwing bangers with various effigies blown up for whatever reason.

Frank wrote:Setting things on fire with big explosions wins over "getting drunk lol" every time.

While I suppose celebrating the anniversary of government almost being blown to pieces is more than "getting drunk lol" versus Halloween it's pretty much that and blowing stuff up.

I got woken up by the start of Bonfire season (there are about 10 bonfire days in different places) at 7am last Saturday by 3 charges from a strawberry floating cannon on the South Downs.

No finer way to start bonfire night season than a good old fashioned cannonade. :datass:

Bonfire night, mainly because I like setting gooseberry fool on fire.

If we went back to Samhain I might be convinced to change my vote.

Frank wrote:Setting things on fire with big explosions wins over "getting drunk lol" every time.

Why not both?

Oh, my vote is for Guy Fawkes Night. It's Britain's best tradition.

Halloween's good for being a perv or whatever, but there's nothing quite like drunkenly burning people in effigy while fireworks go off all around.

I'm not English so Guy Fawkes just seems really strange. As far as I can gather, the holiday was originally created to promote the persecution of a religous minority. Seems a bit dodgey.

We don't do Guy Fawkes Night or Thankgiving here, so I guess it has to be Halloween... (It seems like it would be the best holiday out of the three anyway).

Meep wrote:I'm not English so Guy Fawkes just seems really strange. As far as I can gather, the holiday was originally created to promote the persecution of a religous minority. Seems a bit dodgey.

Guy Fawkes was part of a conspiracy to blow up parliament and kill all of the MPs and the king.

Anti-Catholic feeling certainly ramped up the feelings around the holiday and it added to the persecution, but nowadays it’s just an excuse to burn and blow things up.

Lorn64 wrote:We don't do Guy Fawkes Night or Thankgiving here, so I guess it has to be Halloween... (It seems like it would be the best holiday out of the three anyway).

Where is "here" for you?

Moggy wrote:Guy Fawkes was part of a conspiracy to blow up parliament and kill all of the MPs and the king.

I'm no history expert, but I'm pretty sure that Guy Fawkes was a time traveller, sent back to blow up Parliament after the real Guy Fawkes was killed in a plane crash a month before the plot was scheduled to take place. Failing to blow up the government would have enabled parliament to pass sweeping legislation to permit Sentinels to hunt down and enslave all mutants, so Picard and Data sent Hugh Jackman back in time to see it through.

NickSCFC

Halloween's certainly winning the retail war.

My local Tesco has a whole aisle dedicated to Halloween with costumes, sweets, do and horror DVDs lining the shelves.

There's a small display for fireworks near the entrance, even the old Tommy flogging poppies takes up a larger area.

NickSCFC

Driving around it seems that we've started to copy the Americans by decorating the front of our houses, spotting lots of pumpkins by people's doors and skeleton s and gravestones adoring lawns.

Conversely, I've not seen a single bonfire yet, when I was younger kids would be piling up wood in fields by this point, but it doesn't seem to happen any more, apart from...

Halloween is a far better celebration than guy Fawkes night.

What we actually need in this country is a proper summer celebration like they have with the 4th July in the states. Where we can celebrate with fireworks in the warmth rather than the freezing cold and then run back to our cars and go home.

The whole appeal of bonfire night is that it's dark and cold and you have a giant fire and drink warm drinks though

A summer celebration wouldn't be a good idea because we can't guarantee the weather, much better how it works currently with everyone having impromptu barbeques the moment a heat wave hits.

OrangeRKN wrote:A summer celebration wouldn't be a good idea because we can't guarantee the weather

Yes but one of the many (many many) benefits of global warming is that we will soon be able to have guaranteed 12-week heat waves across the entire country, so a summer celebration celebrating (for example) the Battle of Waterloo (18th June, perfect) will do nicely.

NickSCFC

Seems the Telegraph aren't keen on Halloween pushing Bonfire night aside

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/col ... ening.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hal ... dults.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinkin ... arade.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/tel ... nfire.html

OrangeRKN wrote:The whole appeal of bonfire night is that it's dark and cold and you have a giant fire and drink warm drinks though

A summer celebration wouldn't be a good idea because we can't guarantee the weather, much better how it works currently with everyone having impromptu barbeques the moment a heat wave hits.

I disagree. November is generally too cold for me to celebrate outside. They still have fireworks and even bonfires on the 4th July in the states.

Just put a hat and scarf on m8

NickSCFC · Last edited by NickSCFC on Thu Nov 01, 2018 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Fantastic article about the reasons behind Halloween overtaking Guy Fawkes night in Britain.

https://www.samizdata.net/2012/11/is-halloween-su/

Meanwhile, what of Halloween? What’s the appeal of that? Let me try to count at least some of the many reasons why Halloween, unlike Bonfire Night, is now on the rise. It starts with the changed content of popular culture, since the time of my childhood. The shared folk-tales of the British people used to be of such people as Henry the Eighth and his six wives, his daughter Elizabeth and her admiral Drake, Charles the First and his unhappy end, later naval heroes like Nelson, national enemies like Napoleon, the stories of Shakespeare and Dickens, nursery rhymes about past happenings such as the Great Fire of London and the Black Death, and so on and so on, all of which had recently been vastly enriched within almost everyone’s living memory by that hugely impressive new twentieth century super-villain, Adolf Hitler, and by our own local super-hero, Winston Churchill. Popular culture was based on memories of the national past, recent and not so recent.

The arrival of television, and the Hollywoodised pop culture that it inserted into Britain, didn’t entirely change all that, but it did change it a hell of a lot, and it continues to. Now, popular culture is more and more rooted in a fantasy world populated by people like Darth Vader and Harry Potter. Our nation’s actual history is for old guys like me. The interest that my generation has in the Second World War, and the even greater interest of what still remains of the generation that actually lived through and fought in that war, is now as much an object of mockery as of respect. It has been that way ever since Beyond The Fringe.

A few thoughts

1. Younger people are more interested in Hollywood fiction like Star Wars, Avengers, Harry Potter and zombies than actual history, you can dress as these characters during halloween

2. Halloween has global appeal, it's now popular in countries like China, India and Japan, it's universal where as Guy Fawkes' Catholic burning is divisive

3. Social media, look at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and it's full of people sharing pictures of friends and family dressed in various costumes, celebrities have really taken advantage of this. As for bonfire night, there's no equivalent.

NickSCFC wrote:Fantastic article about the reasons behind Halloween overtaking Guy Fawkes night in Britain.

https://www.samizdata.net/2012/11/is-halloween-su/

A few thoughts

1. Younger people are more interested in Hollywood fiction like Star Wars, Avengers, Harry Potter and zombies than actual history, you can dress as these characters during halloween

2. Halloween has global appeal, it's now popular in countries like China, India and Japan, it's universal where as Guy Fawkes' Catholic burning is divisive

3. Social media, look at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and it's full of people sharing pictures of friends and family dressed in various costumes, celebrities have really taken advantage of this. As for bonfire night, there's no equivalent.

Well give it a chance, it doesn't happen till next Monday.

GR Decides - Halloween or Guy Fawkes Night?

Which do you prefer?

Who is online

Affiliates