So Halloween has just passed and is generally an excuse for chavs to terrorise the neighbourhood. It’s Bonfire night on the 5th but most places are doing stuff tonight and Saturday (ie fireworks etc.).

Halloween

Both a film and a celebrated holiday throughout the world. Halloween, or Hallowe’en, is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties, visiting “haunted houses” and carving jack-o-lanterns. The term Halloween (and its alternative rendering Halloween) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the eve of “All Hallows’ Day”, which is now also known as All Saints’ Day. Some modern Halloween traditions developed out of older pagan traditions, especially surrounding the Irish holiday Samhain, a day associated both with the harvest and otherworldly spirits. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is now celebrated in several parts of the Western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom and occasionally in parts of Australia and New Zealand.

Many European cultural traditions, in particular Celtic cultures, hold that Halloween is one of the times of the year when spirits can make contact with the physical world, and when magic is most potent (according to, for example, Catalan mythology about witches and Scottish and Irish tales of the Sídhe).

Below is an awesome pic I was sent recently. This kid gets props for original thinking.

But more than likely he’s gonna get the crap beaten out of him if he knocks on the wrong door…. I’m gonna file that one under “Politically Incorrect..but funny”.

Worst outfit goes to Paris Hilton. Not to be outdone she changed into a different one 1/2 way through the night!

BONFIRE NIGHT

So now we’re running up to bonfire night let’s explore a bit of the history behind it!

Guy Fawkes Night (traditionally known as Bonfire, or Fireworks, Night) is an annual celebration (but not a public holiday) on the evening of the 5th of November primarily in the United Kingdom, but also in former British colonies New Zealand, the island of Newfoundland (Canada), Vancouver Island, Canada, parts of the British Caribbean including the Bahamas, and to some extent by their nationals abroad. Bonfire Night was common in Australia until the 1980s, but it was held on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend in June.

It celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in which a group of Catholic conspirators, led by one Robert Catesby, and including Guy Fawkes, attempted to blow up the Palace of Westminster on the evening of 5 November 1605, when the Protestant James I of England (James VI of Scotland), his eldest sons, and the majority of the English Parliament were within its walls. The conspirators were later tortured and executed.

The celebrations, which in the United Kingdom take place in towns and villages across the country, involve fireworks displays and the building of bonfires, on which “guys”, or dummies, representing Guy Fawkes, the most infamous of the conspirators, are traditionally burnt. Before the fifth, children traditionally use the “guys” to beg for money with the chant “Penny for the guy”. In recent years the night is becoming increasingly known as “Guy Fawkes Night”.

So we basically celebrate the hang, drawn, and quartering of the Gun Powder Plot Conspirators…… NICE!!! . Fawkes, however, managed to avoid the worst of this execution by jumping from the scaffold where he was supposed to be hanged, breaking his neck before he could be drawn and quartered…… Good Job!!!