LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.11 (02) [DE-EN-NL]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 11 October 2009 - Volume 02
lowlands at lowlands-l.net - http://lowlands-l.net/
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From: wim <wkv at home.nl>
Subject: LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (01) [EN] hollow ween

>From wim Verdoold

wkv at home.nl

Zwolle, Salland, Nederland

Hi Everybody,

Halloween is totally un Dutch, we don’t do that… and I hope we will never
will.

It has no connection with the culture and traditions of the low countries
what so ever

It s an American commercialised thing, with some vague Celtic roman (
“catholic”) roots ,

We still have St Maarten on the 11th of November , if you want lanterns, and
treats,  also with Roman roots, but still, also celebrated in the Christian
part of the Netherlands, even after the reformation.

And there is of cause St Nicolaas …!   but no Halloween, I hope it will
never take roots… Halloween..it s like what they, the shopkeepers..  try to
do to our Kerstfeest…   ( no gifts on a Dutch kerstfeest , we get the gifts
on December 5)  Commercioalised american/german Christmas is very
commercial, and away from it’s roots , and un Dutch..  I try to keep it out
of my house!

So no Halloween!

Not in Zwolle.

Groeten uit Zwolle,

Wim Verdoold

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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (03) [EN]

Re Halloween: Hi Luc, You are right. I did not know about “Scary Halloween”
either until I arrived in the US. But then I did not know about November 1st?
, Dias de los Muertes?? either. Maybe life in the Lowlands during that
period of the year was so miserable that we did not need an extra reminder
of our mortality?  Jacqueline

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From: Marcus Buck <list at marcusbuck.org>
 Subject: LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (03) [EN]

From: Hellinckx Luc <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com <mailto:luc.hellinckx at gmail.com
>>

> Subject: LL-L "Traditions"
>
> Beste Ron,
>
>> This post (to break the silence) straddles the topics "Traditions",
>> "Etymology" and "Projects". If there are any responses to it we will see in
>> which direction they will take us.
>>
>
> Halloween has absolutely no significance whatsoever here in Belgium. It has
> no roots at all in traditional culture. Stories of "scary fun" abound, but
> they bear no relation with "Halloween". There is no need to mention the word
> at all, it just makes me upset.
>
> Kind greetings,
>
> Luc Hellinckx, Halle, Belgium
>
+1
My main association for Halloween is: "scary". It's a scary example of
cultural erosion. As Luc said, Halloween has absolutely no traditional base
anywhere outside the Celtic substrated Anglo-Saxon areas. But for Germany I
cannot echo the sentence about "no significance". Halloween is significant
in Germany. When I was a child I had never heard of Halloween. It was
completely unknown to most people in Germany. My first contact was when I
was a teenager in the '90s. American series like 'The Simpsons' regularly
had Halloween specials. So people started to know about its existance, but
it had still no significance in Germany. But the Halloween theme was present
in the media (well, mainly in the medium TV). And some years ago (I cannot
tell the exact year, but it was after 2000) I noticed the first news reports
on TV about customed children asking for sweets on Halloween. That was in
the bigger cities. Two years ago it reached my own village of 200
inhabitants. The first year many people were quite baffled when a crowd of
children stood at the door and asked for sweets. The second year, of course,
the people were prepared better. So by now Halloween is fully established as
a valid custom in Germany.

My reaction, when I heard about this cultural intrusion, was: let's boycot
it. But of course my boycot was boycotted. It's quite futile to start a
discussion about cultural imperalism with a bunch of kids between 5 and 10
who lust for sugar ;-)

TV was the only vector over which Halloween spread. It was able to fully
establish Halloween in Germany in just a few years. That shows how powerful
TV is. And that's why I believe, that a dedicated TV station is the most
effective way to support a language that suffers from language decline.

Let me add, that going from door to door and asking for sweets is part of a
traditional custom too. Kids do this on New Year's Day. They go to every
house and they wish "Prost Neujahr" (formerly "Proost Neejohr" in Low Saxon,
but that already was gone in the '80s). Then they get some sweets (formerly
also nuts, tangerines and gingerbread, but that's gone now too). Grown-up
people do this too, but they'll drink rum grog (from them you can still hear
"Proost Neejohr").

Marcus Buck

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Traditions

Folks,

Of course I respect religious, cultural, ethical and political sensitivities
once I am aware of them.

Here just for a historical and anthropological perspective, though not meant
to defend commercially exploited Halloween:

Halloween as we know it these days is largely based on Insular Goidelic
traditions and came to North America with the Irish potato famine. But there
were many Pre-Christian traditions like it all over Europe and its former
colonies, the traces of some of which can still be found. I do not know if
all of them have Celtic links, and I rather doubt it, though in the case of
the Mexican Day of the Dead (*El Día de los Muertos*) a.k.a. All Souls Day (
*Conmemoración de los Fieles Difuntos*) and similar Latin American
traditions there may be a Celto-Iberian link with Roman Catholic and Native
American traditions.

Similar traditions of commemorating departed souls infused with occult
folklore still exist throughout Eurasia and are better preserved outside the
Christianized and Islamicized ranges of cultures. In China you have the
so-called "Ghost Festival" (中元節 ~ 鬼節) in early fall, and it goes hand in
hand with the Ullambana tradition, often referred to as "Hungry Ghost
Festival," in ethno-Mahayana Buddhism. In Vietnam, departed souls return for
visits and are fed and housed on Tết Trung Nguyên, with the aim of invoking
pardons for those among them that had been condemned. This is similar to the
o-Bon (お盆) tradition of Japan in which native Shintoism mingles with
introduced Confucianism and Buddhism, also linked with Chinese-derived
o-Chūgen (お中元). Throughout Siberia and Central Asia, in between Eastern Asia
and Europe, there are numerous similar Shamanist-based traditions, also
typically in the fall and winter seasons. From Eastern Siberia we are likely
to be able to trace these into the Americas, at the western end to the
Shamanist roots of Finnic traditions with their soul duality and
communication with the realm of afterlife (Finnish *tuonela ~ manala*,
Estonian *toonela ~ manala*). Popularized and commercialized bells and
whistles aside, I can see nothing essentially bad in these traditions, for
they are apparently global cultural expressions of man's spiritual yearning
for communication with ancestors in other realms of being, also serving as a
reminder of one's mortality and all that entails.

Within the Christianized range of cultures, churches were built on top of
Pre-Christian places of worship and Pre-Christian holidays were supplanted
by Christian ones, all in an effort to stamp out, or rather smother, all
remnants of "paganism" (which culminated in the "witches" holocaust) or at
least to give "pagan" traditions Christian spins. In some cases this
required Christian holidays to be moved to coincide with and hopefully
supplant the nearest "pagan" equivalents. This was so also in the case of
All Hallows Eve which Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved from May 13 to
November 1 to coincide with Samhain and similar holidays commemorating the
departed in the fall. (So if anyone is to be blamed for name confusion here
it ought to be those two.)

Being close to winter solstice traditions, which came to be supplanted by
Christmas (aside from New Year), these traditions overlapped and mixed with
those of Christmas and New Year, also those of Martinmas with its apparently
Pre-Christian mummery and lanterns. In largely Protestant Northern Germany,
there are communities in which originally Roman Catholic Martinmas is still
celebrated with mummers and guisers (people, usually children, in fancy
dress) going from door to door performing and expecting treats, very much as
it is done in the Celtic Halloween tradition (and the Manx Hop-tu-Naa
tradition) with its trick-o-treating and jack-o-lanterns. In other
communities this is done on New Year's Eve, just as it in Scotland
(Hogmanay). Walking-the-lantern traditions still exist there in the fall
even with no mention of Martinmas. Going eastward, we find similar
traditions in the Persian Gulf States, especially in Kuwait, where on
Qarqe‛ān (قرقيعان‎) during Ramaḍān (رمضان‎) children in fancy dress go from
door to door expecting treats. Similar traditions are found among Christian
Arabs of the Middle East on Saint Barabara's Day (عيد البربرا, December 4).
Going even farther east, we find regional Chinese festivals in which guisers
roam villages, very often on stilts.  During the European Middle Ages,
guising and mummery constituted a prominent complex of diverse traditions,
some of which were of the "scary" type, reminding people that death was an
ever-present reality and was the eternal equalizer (well known through
the *dance
macabre* tradition).

My point here is that Halloween is not an isolated phenomenon but is really
only a small fragment of a very large cultural complex of which traces can
be found throughout Eurasia and beyond in Africa and the Americas. In some
areas these have survived better than in others, usually by merging with and
taking on names and trappings of traditions introduced by superimposed
official religions.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

Wikipedia:
Many Christians ascribe no negative significance to Halloween, treating it
as a purely secular holiday devoted to celebrating "imaginary spooks" and
handing out candy. Halloween celebrations are common among Roman Catholic
parochial schools throughout North America and in Ireland. In fact, the
Roman Catholic Church sees Halloween as having a Christian connection.
Father Gabriele Amorth, a Vatican-appointed exorcist in Rome, has said,
"[I]f 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. Other Christians feel
concerned about Halloween, and reject the holiday because they believe it
trivializes (and celebrates) "the occult" and what they perceive as evil. 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
origin as a pagan "Festival of the Dead." In more recent years, the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has organized a "Saint Fest" on the holiday.
Many contemporary Protestant churches view Halloween as a fun event for
children, holding events in their churches where children and their parents
can dress up, play games, and get candy. Jehovah's Witnesses do not
celebrate Halloween for they believe anything originated from a pagan
holiday should not be celebrated by true Christians.

•

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