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October 31 Halloween An odd custom, very familiar to the young but not to the old for whom it's curiously foreign despite having been celebrated for hundreds of years. Those huge pumpkins don't seem British. Kids dressed as spooks, parents shepherding small children in pointed hats and black lipstick, teenagers behaving outrageously. |
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November 5th Guy Fawkes Day This year it's on a Wednesday so we get two weekends and many days of bangs and crashes plus an overwhelming stench of cordite – and it's also Diwali. Not easy to tell where one begins and the other ends except that Diwali seems to happen later at night. Fireworks Day, celebrated all over but in particularly spectacular fashion in Lewes with politically incorrect guys burnt on huge bonfires. Not a place to be if you don't like fire or crowds but it looks amazing. For something a little more peaceful, settle for a splendid guy alone and in flames on a traditionally conical bonfire. Children no longer seem to beg for 'Penny for the Guy' but Sparklers never pall. Domestic fireworks displays have become prohibitively expensive – which may be a good thing for pets and those of a nervous disposition but the organised affairs get bigger and bigger. Fireworks technology is a splendid thing.
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Remembrance Day Without poppies, this often depressing day would be bleak indeed. Cold, damp, black-clad people wishing they were not standing in the street in front of the war memorial where poppies are the only colour. Papaver rhoeas, corn poppies, field poppies, red poppies, Flanders poppies. John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields which was published in Punch in December 1915 and thus was a legend born. In Flanders Fields In Flanders fields the poppies blow We are the Dead. Short days ago Take up our quarrel with the foe: We have poppies in fields, poppies on memorials, poppies in buttonholes, poppies on Remembrance Day, poppies strewn across the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, multitudes of tiny crosses with poppies. We have the old and the young remembering with poppies. The old know why they are there but the young may not. When they too are old, they may then understand. |
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And then there’s Christmas (and Boxing Day and New Year...) Not just your standard lights and Santas, but all the traditional customs and a few absurdities into the bargain. |
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More Halloween pictures
