Click image to enlarge
GREETINGS, FEEL FREE
TO
"SHOP NAKED."©
We deal in items we believe others will enjoy and want to purchase.
We are not experts.
We welcome any comments, questions, or concerns.
WE ARE TARGETING A GLOBAL MARKET PLACE.
Thanks in advance for your patronage.
Please Be sure to add WDG to your favorites list!
NOW FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE…
UNUSUAL PICTORIAL PAPER NAPKIN
SEASONAL / HALLOWEEN
EPHMERA
DEPICTS A YOUNG BOY HOLDING HIS CARVED PUMPKIN
IN HIS FAUTLEROY SUIT
A ARCHING BLACK CAT HISSING
A SHELF OF OTHER JACK-O-LANTERNS
A BLACK BAT
A BLACK OWL
AND OMINOUS CANDLES
HEAVY PAPER STOCK / CREPE PAPER
MEASURES ABOUT 13.5" X 14"
c. 1930 +/-
SMALL SPOT TO RIGHT BOTTOM EDGE
CURRENTLY UNDER GLASS
FRAGILE / PERISHABLE
SEASONAL / HALLOWEEN
EPHMERA
DEPICTS A YOUNG BOY HOLDING HIS CARVED PUMPKIN
IN HIS FAUTLEROY SUIT
A ARCHING BLACK CAT HISSING
A SHELF OF OTHER JACK-O-LANTERNS
A BLACK BAT
A BLACK OWL
AND OMINOUS CANDLES
HEAVY PAPER STOCK / CREPE PAPER
MEASURES ABOUT 13.5" X 14"
c. 1930 +/-
SMALL SPOT TO RIGHT BOTTOM EDGE
CURRENTLY UNDER GLASS
FRAGILE / PERISHABLE
SUITABLE FOR PROFESSINAL FRAMING
CAN BE SHIPPED W/ OR WITHOUT GLASS
PRICING IS CURRENTLY NO GLASS
CAN BE SHIPPED W/ OR WITHOUT GLASS
PRICING IS CURRENTLY NO GLASS
----------------------------------------------
FYI
Halloween, or Hallowe'en, is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31st. Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, costume parties, viewing horror films, visiting "haunted houses", and participating in traditional autumn activities such as hayrides (which may have "haunted" themes).
Halloween originated under the name of Samhain as a Pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries have embraced the holiday as a part of American pop culture in the late twentieth century.
Halloween is now celebrated in parts of the western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and sometimes in Australia and New Zealand. In recent years, the holiday has also been celebrated in parts of Western Europe.
The term Halloween (and its older rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening of/before "All Hallows' Day", also known as "All Saints' Day". It was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the old Christian feast of All Saints' Day from May 13 to November 1. In the ninth century, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. Although we now consider All Saints' (or Hallows') Day to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays were, at that time, celebrated on the same day. Liturgically, the Church traditionally celebrated that day as the Vigil of All Saints, and, until 1970, a day of fasting as well. Like other vigils, it was celebrated on the previous day if it fell on a Sunday, although secular celebrations of the holiday remained on the 31st. The Vigil was suppressed in 1955, but was later restored in the post-Vatican II calendar.
In Ireland, the name of the holiday was All Hallows' Eve (often shortened to Hallow Eve), and though seldom used today, the name is still well-accepted, albeit somewhat esoteric. In Irish, the festival is known as Oíche Shamhna (Night of Samhain), or simply Samhain; in Scottish Gaelic it is Samhainn or Samhain; in Welsh, Calan Gaeaf to the Welsh; "Allantide" to the Cornish and "Hop-tu-Naa" to the Manx. Halloween is also called Pooky Night in parts of Ireland, presumably named after the púca, a mischievous spirit.
Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal 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 Irish tales of the Sídhe).
The carved pumpkin, lit by a candle inside, is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. This is an Irish tradition of carving a lantern which goes back centuries. These lanterns are usually carved from a turnip or swede (or more uncommonly a mangelwurzel). The carving of pumpkins was first associated with Halloween in North America, where the pumpkin was available, and much larger and easier to carve. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their home's doorstep after dark.
The jack-o'-lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard drinking old farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree, and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack which dooms him to forever wander the earth at night. For centuries, the bedtime parable was told by Irish parents to their children. At Halloween time, the children carved out turnips, placing a candle inside to symbolize Jack's curse. But in America the tradition of carving pumpkins is known to have preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration, and the tradition of carving vegetable lanterns may also have been brought over by the Scottish or English; documentation is unavailable to establish when or by whom. The carved pumpkin was associated generally with harvest time in America, and did not become specifically associated with Halloween until the mid to late 19th century.
The imagery surrounding Halloween is largely an amalgamation of the Halloween season itself, nearly a century of work from American filmmakers and graphic artists, and a rather commercialized take on the dark and mysterious. Halloween imagery tends to involve death, magic, or mythical monsters. Common Halloween characters include, skeletons, ghosts, ghouls, witches, vampires, bats, owls, crows, vultures, haunted houses, pumpkinmen, black cats, aliens, spiders, goblins, zombies, mummies, skeletons, werewolves and demons. Particularly in America, symbolism is inspired by classic horror films, which contain fictional figures like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy. More modern horror antagonists like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and the Jigsaw Killer have also become associated with the holiday. Homes are often decorated with these symbols around Halloween.
Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. In modern Halloween images and products, purple, green and red are also prominent. The use of these colors is largely a result of holiday advertising dating back over a century, and tends to be associated with various aspects of Halloween tradition.
Trick-or-treating, also known as guising, is an activity for children on Halloween in which they proceed from house to house in costumes, asking for treats such as candy with the question, "Trick or treat?" Trick-or-treating is one of the main traditions of Halloween. It has become socially expected that if one lives in a neighborhood with children one should purchase candy in preparation for trick-or-treaters. The National Confectioners Association reported in 2005 that 80 percent of adults in America planned to give out candy to trick-or-treaters, and that 93 percent of children planned to go trick-or-treating.
The activity is popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada, and due to culture importation in recent years has started to occur among children in Australia and New Zealand, in many parts of Europe, and in the Saudi Aramco camps of Dhahran and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. The most significant growth — and resistance — is in the United Kingdom, where the police have threatened to prosecute parents who allow their children to carry out the "trick" element.
In Sweden children dress up as witches and go trick-or-treating on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter) while Danish children dress up in various attires and go trick-or-treating on Fastelavn (or the next day, Shrove Monday).
History
Trick-or-treaters in Dublin, Ireland
The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays goes back to the Middle Ages, and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of "souling," when poor folk would go door to door, receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (All Hallows Day). It originated in the British Isles, and is still popular in Ireland, and in some parts of England and Scotland. Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of "puling [whimpering, whining], like a beggar at Hallowmas."
Yet there is no evidence that souling was ever practiced in America, and trick-or-treating may have developed in America independent of any Irish or British antecedent. There is little primary documentation of masking or costuming on Halloween — in Ireland, the UK, or America — before 1900. The earliest reference to ritual begging on Halloween in English-speaking America occurs in 1915, with another isolated reference in Chicago in 1920. The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but do not depict trick-or-treating. Ruth Edna Kelley, in her 1919 history of the holiday, The Book of Hallowe'en, makes no mention of such a custom in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America." It does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the earliest known uses in print of the term "trick or treat" appearing in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939. Thus, although the first great wave of Irish immigration to America came during the Irish Potato Famine in 1845–1849, and British and Irish immigration to America peaked in the 1880s, ritualized begging on Halloween was virtually unknown in America until generations later.
Trick-or-treating spread from the western United States eastward, stalled by sugar rationing that began in April 1942 during World War II and did not end until June 1947.
Early national attention to trick-or-treating was given in October 1947 issues of the children's magazines Jack and Jill and Children's Activities, and by Halloween episodes of the network radio programs The Baby Snooks Show in 1946 and The Jack Benny Show and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1948. The custom had become firmly established in popular culture by 1952, when Walt Disney portrayed it in the cartoon Trick or Treat, and UNICEF first conducted a national campaign for children to raise funds for the charity while trick-or-treating.
Trick-or-treating on the prairieAlthough some popular histories of Halloween have characterized trick-or-treating as an adult invention to rechannel Halloween activities away from vandalism, nothing in the historical record supports this theory. To the contrary, adults, as reported in newspapers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, typically saw it as a form of extortion, with reactions ranging from bemused indulgence to anger (the "trick" part of "trick or treat" was a threat to prank). Likewise, as portrayed on radio shows, children would have to explain what trick-or-treating was to puzzled adults, and not the other way around. Sometimes even the children protested: for Halloween 1948, members of the Madison Square Boys Club in New York City carried a parade banner that read "American Boys Don't Beg."
Religious perspectives and controversies
In Ireland, Halloween is far more traditional an event than in North America, with more cultural and historical significance, as opposed to the commercialized importance on the other side of the Atlantic. Therefore even amongst most Christians it is a far more accepted holiday with hardly any moral objections, in particular amongst Roman Catholics. However some people do find an Americanization occurring towards Halloween, which in turn could affect some traditions, notably the Samhain origins of the festival. It should also be noted that Guy Fawkes night is not celebrated in the Republic of Ireland at all. (In fact it is prohibited as it is a British protestant celebration of Catholic failure to overthrow the Monarchy in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. In the past, it was used in Britain as a celebration of Protestant Ascendancy). Therefore Halloween replaces the celebrations that are experienced in the UK on November 5, whereas in Britain Guy Fawkes Night is culturally more important.
In North America, Christian attitudes towards Halloween are quite diverse. The fact that All Saints Day and Halloween occur on two consecutive days has left some Christians uncertain of how they should treat this holiday. In the Anglican Church, some dioceses have chosen to emphasize the Christian traditions of All Saints Day, while some Protestants celebrate the holiday as Reformation Day, a day of remembrance and prayers for unity. Celtic Christians may have Samhain services that focus on the cultural aspects of the holiday, in the belief that many ancient Celtic customs are "compatible with the new Christian religion. Christianity embraced the Celtic notions of family, community, the bond among all people, and respect for the dead. Throughout the centuries, pagan and Christian beliefs intertwine in a gallimaufry (hodgepodge) of celebrations from October 31 through November 5, all of which appear both to challenge the ascendancy of the dark and to revel in its mystery."
Some Christian churches commonly offer a fall festival or harvest-themed alternative to Halloween. Most Christians ascribe no significance to Halloween, treating it as a purely secular entity devoted to celebrating "imaginary spooks" and handing out candy. Halloween celebrations are common among Roman Catholic parochial schools throughout North America, and in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church sees it as a "harmless ancient custom". Father Gabriele Amorth, a Vatican-appointed exorcist in Rome, has said, "If English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that." Most Christians hold the view that the tradition is far from being "satanic" in origin or practice and that it holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children: being taught about death and mortality, and the ways of the Celtic ancestors actually being a valuable life lesson and a part of many of their parishioners' heritage. A response among some fundamentalists in recent years has been the use of Hell houses or themed pamphlets (such as those of Jack T. Chick) which attempt to make use of Halloween as an opportunity for evangelism. Some consider Halloween to be completely incompatible with the Christian faith, due to "its preoccupation with the occult in symbols, masks and costumes," its origin as a Pagan "festival of the dead", and the fact that it is also observed, albeit in a non-traditional form, by Satanists. In more recent years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has organised a "Saint Fest" on the holiday.
Many Jews and Muslims have similar religious objections to Halloween. People of diverse religions (or no religion at all) may naturally be concerned about the vandalism and destructive behavior that can occur on the holiday. Halloween is a prime time for vandalism, sometimes targeting holy sites such as places of worship or cemeteries. Objections to celebrating Halloween are not always limited to those of the Abrahamic religions. Some Wiccans feel that the tradition is offensive to "real witches" for promoting stereotypical caricatures of "wicked witches". Some Neopagans and Wiccans also object to Halloween because they perceive it to be a "vulgarised, commercialised mockery" of the original Samhain rituals. However, other Neopagans, perhaps most of them, see it as a harmless holiday in which some of the old traditions are celebrated by the mainstream culture, albeit in a different manner.
Fiction
Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree features the holiday prominently. Halloween is frequently mentioned as an important date in the Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling, whose central themes are wizardry and magic. In Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, several pivotal events occur on Halloween night, including the death of the original 'Nite-Owl'. Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the character of the Headless Horseman are often linked to the holiday in the public mindset due to later adaptations (though Halloween is not actually mentioned in the original work).
Films in which Halloween plays a major role include adaptations of the above works, plus the Halloween film series, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Donnie Darko, and Hocus Pocus.
Numerous Halloween television specials have been broadcast, notably It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the annual Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episodes.
Halloween originated under the name of Samhain as a Pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries have embraced the holiday as a part of American pop culture in the late twentieth century.
Halloween is now celebrated in parts of the western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and sometimes in Australia and New Zealand. In recent years, the holiday has also been celebrated in parts of Western Europe.
The term Halloween (and its older rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening of/before "All Hallows' Day", also known as "All Saints' Day". It was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the old Christian feast of All Saints' Day from May 13 to November 1. In the ninth century, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. Although we now consider All Saints' (or Hallows') Day to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays were, at that time, celebrated on the same day. Liturgically, the Church traditionally celebrated that day as the Vigil of All Saints, and, until 1970, a day of fasting as well. Like other vigils, it was celebrated on the previous day if it fell on a Sunday, although secular celebrations of the holiday remained on the 31st. The Vigil was suppressed in 1955, but was later restored in the post-Vatican II calendar.
In Ireland, the name of the holiday was All Hallows' Eve (often shortened to Hallow Eve), and though seldom used today, the name is still well-accepted, albeit somewhat esoteric. In Irish, the festival is known as Oíche Shamhna (Night of Samhain), or simply Samhain; in Scottish Gaelic it is Samhainn or Samhain; in Welsh, Calan Gaeaf to the Welsh; "Allantide" to the Cornish and "Hop-tu-Naa" to the Manx. Halloween is also called Pooky Night in parts of Ireland, presumably named after the púca, a mischievous spirit.
Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal 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 Irish tales of the Sídhe).
The carved pumpkin, lit by a candle inside, is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. This is an Irish tradition of carving a lantern which goes back centuries. These lanterns are usually carved from a turnip or swede (or more uncommonly a mangelwurzel). The carving of pumpkins was first associated with Halloween in North America, where the pumpkin was available, and much larger and easier to carve. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their home's doorstep after dark.
The jack-o'-lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard drinking old farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree, and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack which dooms him to forever wander the earth at night. For centuries, the bedtime parable was told by Irish parents to their children. At Halloween time, the children carved out turnips, placing a candle inside to symbolize Jack's curse. But in America the tradition of carving pumpkins is known to have preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration, and the tradition of carving vegetable lanterns may also have been brought over by the Scottish or English; documentation is unavailable to establish when or by whom. The carved pumpkin was associated generally with harvest time in America, and did not become specifically associated with Halloween until the mid to late 19th century.
The imagery surrounding Halloween is largely an amalgamation of the Halloween season itself, nearly a century of work from American filmmakers and graphic artists, and a rather commercialized take on the dark and mysterious. Halloween imagery tends to involve death, magic, or mythical monsters. Common Halloween characters include, skeletons, ghosts, ghouls, witches, vampires, bats, owls, crows, vultures, haunted houses, pumpkinmen, black cats, aliens, spiders, goblins, zombies, mummies, skeletons, werewolves and demons. Particularly in America, symbolism is inspired by classic horror films, which contain fictional figures like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy. More modern horror antagonists like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and the Jigsaw Killer have also become associated with the holiday. Homes are often decorated with these symbols around Halloween.
Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. In modern Halloween images and products, purple, green and red are also prominent. The use of these colors is largely a result of holiday advertising dating back over a century, and tends to be associated with various aspects of Halloween tradition.
Trick-or-treating, also known as guising, is an activity for children on Halloween in which they proceed from house to house in costumes, asking for treats such as candy with the question, "Trick or treat?" Trick-or-treating is one of the main traditions of Halloween. It has become socially expected that if one lives in a neighborhood with children one should purchase candy in preparation for trick-or-treaters. The National Confectioners Association reported in 2005 that 80 percent of adults in America planned to give out candy to trick-or-treaters, and that 93 percent of children planned to go trick-or-treating.
The activity is popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada, and due to culture importation in recent years has started to occur among children in Australia and New Zealand, in many parts of Europe, and in the Saudi Aramco camps of Dhahran and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. The most significant growth — and resistance — is in the United Kingdom, where the police have threatened to prosecute parents who allow their children to carry out the "trick" element.
In Sweden children dress up as witches and go trick-or-treating on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter) while Danish children dress up in various attires and go trick-or-treating on Fastelavn (or the next day, Shrove Monday).
History
Trick-or-treaters in Dublin, Ireland
The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays goes back to the Middle Ages, and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of "souling," when poor folk would go door to door, receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (All Hallows Day). It originated in the British Isles, and is still popular in Ireland, and in some parts of England and Scotland. Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of "puling [whimpering, whining], like a beggar at Hallowmas."
Yet there is no evidence that souling was ever practiced in America, and trick-or-treating may have developed in America independent of any Irish or British antecedent. There is little primary documentation of masking or costuming on Halloween — in Ireland, the UK, or America — before 1900. The earliest reference to ritual begging on Halloween in English-speaking America occurs in 1915, with another isolated reference in Chicago in 1920. The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but do not depict trick-or-treating. Ruth Edna Kelley, in her 1919 history of the holiday, The Book of Hallowe'en, makes no mention of such a custom in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America." It does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the earliest known uses in print of the term "trick or treat" appearing in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939. Thus, although the first great wave of Irish immigration to America came during the Irish Potato Famine in 1845–1849, and British and Irish immigration to America peaked in the 1880s, ritualized begging on Halloween was virtually unknown in America until generations later.
Trick-or-treating spread from the western United States eastward, stalled by sugar rationing that began in April 1942 during World War II and did not end until June 1947.
Early national attention to trick-or-treating was given in October 1947 issues of the children's magazines Jack and Jill and Children's Activities, and by Halloween episodes of the network radio programs The Baby Snooks Show in 1946 and The Jack Benny Show and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1948. The custom had become firmly established in popular culture by 1952, when Walt Disney portrayed it in the cartoon Trick or Treat, and UNICEF first conducted a national campaign for children to raise funds for the charity while trick-or-treating.
Trick-or-treating on the prairieAlthough some popular histories of Halloween have characterized trick-or-treating as an adult invention to rechannel Halloween activities away from vandalism, nothing in the historical record supports this theory. To the contrary, adults, as reported in newspapers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, typically saw it as a form of extortion, with reactions ranging from bemused indulgence to anger (the "trick" part of "trick or treat" was a threat to prank). Likewise, as portrayed on radio shows, children would have to explain what trick-or-treating was to puzzled adults, and not the other way around. Sometimes even the children protested: for Halloween 1948, members of the Madison Square Boys Club in New York City carried a parade banner that read "American Boys Don't Beg."
Religious perspectives and controversies
In Ireland, Halloween is far more traditional an event than in North America, with more cultural and historical significance, as opposed to the commercialized importance on the other side of the Atlantic. Therefore even amongst most Christians it is a far more accepted holiday with hardly any moral objections, in particular amongst Roman Catholics. However some people do find an Americanization occurring towards Halloween, which in turn could affect some traditions, notably the Samhain origins of the festival. It should also be noted that Guy Fawkes night is not celebrated in the Republic of Ireland at all. (In fact it is prohibited as it is a British protestant celebration of Catholic failure to overthrow the Monarchy in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. In the past, it was used in Britain as a celebration of Protestant Ascendancy). Therefore Halloween replaces the celebrations that are experienced in the UK on November 5, whereas in Britain Guy Fawkes Night is culturally more important.
In North America, Christian attitudes towards Halloween are quite diverse. The fact that All Saints Day and Halloween occur on two consecutive days has left some Christians uncertain of how they should treat this holiday. In the Anglican Church, some dioceses have chosen to emphasize the Christian traditions of All Saints Day, while some Protestants celebrate the holiday as Reformation Day, a day of remembrance and prayers for unity. Celtic Christians may have Samhain services that focus on the cultural aspects of the holiday, in the belief that many ancient Celtic customs are "compatible with the new Christian religion. Christianity embraced the Celtic notions of family, community, the bond among all people, and respect for the dead. Throughout the centuries, pagan and Christian beliefs intertwine in a gallimaufry (hodgepodge) of celebrations from October 31 through November 5, all of which appear both to challenge the ascendancy of the dark and to revel in its mystery."
Some Christian churches commonly offer a fall festival or harvest-themed alternative to Halloween. Most Christians ascribe no significance to Halloween, treating it as a purely secular entity devoted to celebrating "imaginary spooks" and handing out candy. Halloween celebrations are common among Roman Catholic parochial schools throughout North America, and in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church sees it as a "harmless ancient custom". Father Gabriele Amorth, a Vatican-appointed exorcist in Rome, has said, "If English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that." Most Christians hold the view that the tradition is far from being "satanic" in origin or practice and that it holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children: being taught about death and mortality, and the ways of the Celtic ancestors actually being a valuable life lesson and a part of many of their parishioners' heritage. A response among some fundamentalists in recent years has been the use of Hell houses or themed pamphlets (such as those of Jack T. Chick) which attempt to make use of Halloween as an opportunity for evangelism. Some consider Halloween to be completely incompatible with the Christian faith, due to "its preoccupation with the occult in symbols, masks and costumes," its origin as a Pagan "festival of the dead", and the fact that it is also observed, albeit in a non-traditional form, by Satanists. In more recent years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has organised a "Saint Fest" on the holiday.
Many Jews and Muslims have similar religious objections to Halloween. People of diverse religions (or no religion at all) may naturally be concerned about the vandalism and destructive behavior that can occur on the holiday. Halloween is a prime time for vandalism, sometimes targeting holy sites such as places of worship or cemeteries. Objections to celebrating Halloween are not always limited to those of the Abrahamic religions. Some Wiccans feel that the tradition is offensive to "real witches" for promoting stereotypical caricatures of "wicked witches". Some Neopagans and Wiccans also object to Halloween because they perceive it to be a "vulgarised, commercialised mockery" of the original Samhain rituals. However, other Neopagans, perhaps most of them, see it as a harmless holiday in which some of the old traditions are celebrated by the mainstream culture, albeit in a different manner.
Fiction
Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree features the holiday prominently. Halloween is frequently mentioned as an important date in the Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling, whose central themes are wizardry and magic. In Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, several pivotal events occur on Halloween night, including the death of the original 'Nite-Owl'. Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the character of the Headless Horseman are often linked to the holiday in the public mindset due to later adaptations (though Halloween is not actually mentioned in the original work).
Films in which Halloween plays a major role include adaptations of the above works, plus the Halloween film series, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Donnie Darko, and Hocus Pocus.
Numerous Halloween television specials have been broadcast, notably It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the annual Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episodes.
(THIS PICTURE FOR DISPLAY ONLY)
---------------------------
Thanks for choosing this sale. You may email for alternate payment arrangements. We combine shipping. Please pay promptly after the auction. The item will be shipped upon receipt of funds. WE ARE GOING GREEN, SO WE DO SOMETIMES USE CLEAN RECYCLED MATERIALS TO SHIP.
Please leave feedback when you have received the item and are satisfied. Please respond when you have received the item.
*****
5*'s
*****
If you were pleased with this transaction, please respond with all 5 stars! If you are not pleased, let us know via e-mail. Our goal is for 5-star service. We want you to be a satisfied, return customer.
Please express any concerns or questions. More pictures are available upon request. The winning bid will incur the cost of S/H INSURED FEDEX OR USPS. See rate calculator or email FOR ESTIMATE. International Bidders are Welcome but be mindful if your country is excluded from safe shipping.
Thanks for perusing THIS and ALL our auctions.
Please Check out our other items!
WE like the curious and odd.
BUY, BYE!!
