Skip to main content

Should Halloween be banned? by Mia-Grace Whitaker


What is Halloween to you? For most, the 31st of October is a festive gathering, a fun night out, or even a day for free treats, but has it ever occurred to you what we are celebrating? Derived from the celts, Halloween is a day marking the beginning of the season of cold, darkness and decay. In order to celebrate it, an annual sacrifice would be made to prevent an entire year of catastrophes, these sacrifices were often 67% of the village’s children! 

The fancy costumes we wear were once animal carcasses, skin and heads, and the innocent jack o’ lanterns we carve were used as a symbol of a fateful deal with the devil. Naturally, it became associated with human death and was used as means to get away with things. Despite this, Halloween is quite simply one of many ‘memento mori’ traditions designed to make death just a little bit more fun and provide an age-appropriate hint to children about an inescapable fact of life, which is that life ends. Wrong. By doing this, death related themes are perceived as a form of entertainment. Are stabbings, muggings and murders really just kid’s play? Is it acceptable to allow young children to recreate the disfigurations of those who have suffered horrendous scarring and have consequently lost their livelihood? This spreads the message that deformity equates to evil. You complain about inequality and judging people solely based on looks, but encourage this by celebrating Halloween. Not just contradicting in your actions, but by telling your child that strangers pose as a threat and then allowing them to go and knock on doors and accept sweets from strangers is going against your morals and most indefinitely placing them in danger.

Imagine young, vulnerable, ingenuous children wandering the streets at night, they are twice as likely to be killed by a car, freely open to child trafficking and at the risk of eating sharp objects or poison disguised by sweets. Are you sure this is just a ‘fun night out?’ What about the senior members of society, how do you think it feels to have noisy, greedy, boisterous children demanding for sweets or otherwise ‘suffering the consequence’. Trick or treat may simply be a greeting, but it serves as a threat and can leave many in distress.

I urge you to consider these factors next Halloween, we must put an end to this monstrosity! How much is one night in terms of your child’s safety, I ask you again, what is Halloween to you?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Should Get Rid of School Uniform

I hate a lot of things about the world: people going on their phones why I'm trying to talk to them, slow walkers, homework.  But today I'm going to speak about something that all children and even parents will agree with.  We should get rid of school uniform.  If we could change anything about schools, it should 100% be the uniform.  Children wake up every morning dreading having to wear that irritating, uncomfortable white shirt shirt with the strangling collar yet again.  It's a pain in the neck (quite literally!).  Even parents hat the thought of school uniform.  Every year you have to rush around making sure your children have all the correct uniform ready and worry that you have forgotten something.  Not only that, but it costs a lot of money to buy uniform.  My parents spent hundreds of pounds for mine and my three siblings' uniforms this year.  Not everyone has the money to do that.  This money could have been better spe...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Animal's Worst Nightmare

As a child, there's nothing more exciting than hearing the phrase, "We're going to the zoo".  Even parents enjoy going because they get the chance to see animals they would never have seen otherwise.  However, as much as it is a pleasure for us, being in a zoo is an animal's worst nightmare. To start off with, keeping animals in cages is cruel.  They are supposed to have freedom and be in their natural environment.  In some zoos, there isn't enough room for them to roam, which will increase the animal's boredom.  This could lead to animal getting irritated and agitated.  An example of this is when you see lions pacing up and down after having children tap and bang on the glass enclosures.  These poor animals!  What did they do wrong in order for us to lock them up?  Personally for me, although I'm sure many of you will also agree, I would much rather see my siblings being kept in these cages - not these innocent, desperate animals. Anothe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignoring The Inevitable

Imagine a world where everybody could see what was happening and change the disastrous future.   What if you could learn the obvious fate and change it for the better? Did You know that every second a football field of rain forest is lost - seven of them by time you’ve read this? Well now you do. You could donate, reach your fingers to the keyboard and select the amount, saving trees, animals, and plants ,supporting the villages around them. But you just don’t care. We all must not do so. We all must change and help. Another example of ignoring the inevitable is cutting down trees for Biomass energy, conservable, that can be used again.   What’s the problem? The dirty energy that is needed for this, and the energy that   is needed when the trees are not in full supply. The fauna that evacuates from their homes, having to leave their nests that are doomed to fall from a great height, cracking the eggs with a squelch and the offspring falling down wi...
Post a Comment
Read more