<div style="text-align: center;">===========================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 11 October 2009 - Volume 02<br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a></span><br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);">
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===========================================<br></div><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><span class="gD" style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28);">wim</span> <span class="go"><<a href="mailto:wkv@home.nl">wkv@home.nl</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI">LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (01) [EN] hollow ween<br><br>From wim Verdoold<br>
<br><a href="mailto:wkv@home.nl">wkv@home.nl</a><br><br>Zwolle, Salland, Nederland<br><br>Hi Everybody,<br><br>Halloween is totally un Dutch, we don’t do that… and I hope we will never will.<br><br>It has no connection with the culture and traditions of the low countries what so ever<br>
<br>It s an American commercialised thing, with some vague Celtic roman ( “catholic”) roots ,<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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!<br>
<br>So no Halloween!<br><br>Not in Zwolle.<br><br>Groeten uit Zwolle,<br><br>Wim Verdoold<br><br>----------<br><br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><span class="gD" style="color: rgb(91, 16, 148);">Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong</span> <span class="go"><<a href="mailto:Dutchmatters@comcast.net">Dutchmatters@comcast.net</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI">LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (03) [EN]<br><br></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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 1<sup>st</sup>? , 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 </span><br><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><br>----------<br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><span class="gD" style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25);">Marcus Buck</span> <span class="go"><<a href="mailto:list@marcusbuck.org">list@marcusbuck.org</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI">LL-L "Traditions" 2009.10.10 (03) [EN]<br><br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: Hellinckx Luc <</span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" href="mailto:luc.hellinckx@gmail.com" target="_blank">luc.hellinckx@gmail.com</a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> <mailto:</span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" href="mailto:luc.hellinckx@gmail.com" target="_blank">luc.hellinckx@gmail.com</a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">>></span><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="im">
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Subject: LL-L "Traditions"<br>
<br>
Beste Ron,<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Kind greetings,<br>
<br>
Luc Hellinckx, Halle, Belgium<br>
</blockquote></div><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
+1</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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 ;-)</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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").</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#888888">
<br>
Marcus Buck</font><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><br>----------<br><br></span><p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<font size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>></span></font></p>
<font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Subject: Traditions</span></font><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Folks,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Of course I respect religious, cultural, ethical and political sensitivities once I am aware of them.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Here just for a historical and anthropological perspective, though not meant to defend commercially exploited Halloween:</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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 (</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">El Día de los Muertos</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">) a.k.a. All Souls Day (</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Conmemoración de los Fieles Difuntos</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">) and similar Latin American traditions there may be a Celto-Iberian link with Roman Catholic and Native American traditions.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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 </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">tuonela ~ manala</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, Estonian </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">toonela ~ manala</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">). 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. </span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> 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.)</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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 (</span><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CRon%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><style>
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</style><span dir="RTL" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" lang="AR-SA">عيد البربرا</span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, 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 </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">dance macabre</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> tradition).</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Regards,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Reinhard/Ron</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Seattle, USA</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Wikipedia:</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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.</span><br>
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