Normally, I am all for the French, with their adamant anti-war stance, and their love of beautiful women and wine, but this business about them not liking Halloween is just silly. Halloween is awesome.

Admittedly, it seems to be a French Catholic move against the holiday, because the Christians love to try and bring down things that they don’t understand. Consider the following quote:

“Halloween has put these Christian holidays into the shade. Lots of young people don’t even know them any more,” said Ines Azais, in charge of an initiative by the French Catholic Church.

“Halloween plays with death, it wants to scare us. But we want to show that we’re not afraid of death. We believe in resurrection and want to celebrate life,” she told Reuters.

These quotes indicate an absolute misunderstanding of what the holiday is all about. Here’s a nice quote from a site about Samhuin (scroll down), which is the original three day Celtic holiday that Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day co-opted:

Around the time that Christians call Halloween (this also includes All Souls and All Saints days) there is a three day festival that begins the Celtic Year. Samhuin is the time of conception, it is the first three days of winter and is also three days of no-time, the three days when the veils between this world and the spirit world are gone.

The germinal idea here being that the dead walk the earth, and thats why people dress up, to scare them off, and food was left out to appease the spirits. I remember when I first learned about that in a slide show at the school library in like 2nd or 3rd great. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever heard.

So I think its preposterous when Christians whine about how Halloween takes the focus off their holidays, because the whole reason they celebrate their holidays at the times they do, is because they stole it from pagans before them. So it serves them right to have their holidays pushed back into the darkness, and have the original spirit of the time come back to the fore - at least sort of.

They also talk at the end of this article about how some people are taking a stand by celebrating the Gallic New Year instead - but that’s what Halloween celebrates dammit!