Halloween
Autumn is really with us, as I looked out of the surgery window on Friday I realised that the leaves were all the most amazing colours and the bushes were loaded with berries. Another sign of the season is the sidelining of all the useful things in the supermarkets to make way for the overpriced, gaudy trash that is intended to celebrate those events I mentioned last week – Halloween and bonfire night. The only thing I am really glad to see is the pile of pumpkins. Not to make lanterns but pumpkin soup, a wonderfully colourful and tasty dish that can be made in bulk and frozen for later.
As I read the paper and listen to the news each day, the financial situation seems to be getting more and more gloomy. Charles Dickens knew what would happen if you earned twenty shillings then spent twenty shillings and sixpence, he had the fiscally challenged Mr Micawber thrown into debtors prison in his book “David Copperfield”. Modern bankers do not seem to have understood this lesson. My grandmother used to say “neither a borrower nor a lender be” but financial advisers do not seem to have heard this one either. Surely it was predictable that if everyone borrowed from everyone else and was charged interest on the loan, they would all go spiralling into gloom and doom.
So if the banks have mislaid everyone’s money, who can afford, or justify, the cost of, tacky, Halloween decorations? I am informed that Tesco’s has a £30 automaton that removes its head whilst talking to you and I, whilst leaving Asda, walked into a life-sized ghoul with white face and fangs dripping blood, raising its top hat. As I looked up from putting my purse in my bag, about to apologise, thinking it was a person standing in the doorway, I saw the price ticket, £60!
Imagine what else £60 could do – it would be three fifths of a milk bottleful of twenty pence pieces for Tubakunde for instance. Does relieving the aforementioned financial gloom have to cost so much? If one were going to celebrate Halloween I am sure more fun could be derived from creating one’s own decorations rather than merely throwing money at the event. Children are brainwashed by the media and peer pressure into believing that fun is everything. At least a properly organised party keeps them safe from dark streets and from ringing doorbells of strangers.
As for trick-or-treat; well I heard a brilliant suggestion this week. No tricks and no sugary sweets, just small items such as bookmarks and erasers, bearing Christian texts, opening the way for evangelism? I have always told the youngsters at my door that I have nothing in response to their, in effect, begging but I also tell them that the real treat is that Jesus died that they might be saved. This usually elicits an egg thrown at my house, but at least I am drip-feeding God’s word and not just haranguing them about preying on innocent folk. Such lecturing is generally useless; as most are not, in fact, devil worshippers but just opportunistic freeloaders. Their belief in the Dark Lord is no greater than their belief in Christ as they open their mass of Christmas gifts, but trick-or-treat provides an opening for us to spread God’s message to the young.
