Your Humble Blogger is associated once more with an institution of higher learning, which makes the Hallowe’en experience even more odd than it had been for a while. Hallowe’en is an odd combination of two holidays, at least these days. It’s a family holiday, mostly about the younger children, four to nine or so, who like to dress up, go out after dark (perhaps the first time in the autumn that they get to go out walking after dark, since darkness falls a tad earlier in October), get candy, give out candy, and eat candy. And, of course, it’s for the parents who like to dress their children up, see the other children in their costumes, get candy, give out candy and eat candy. A family holiday.
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It’s also, of course, a hipster holiday, a holiday of license and licentiousness, a chance to wear revealing clothes and drink heavily and act out. A Castro Street holiday, although no longer actually on Castro Street. A holiday of misbehavior and immoderation. I overheard a young fellow say that his costume for the party would be a drunk guy, and that the clever part was that he wouldn’t be drunk when he got there, but would get more and more drunk over the course of the night, just like a drunk guy at a party would, and to make it more realistic, he would drink heavily all night. I actually think that’s a clever thing to say, although less clever to actually do, but it points up the aspect of the holiday that is most prominent for childless adults: the party.
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They’re not the same holiday. Oh, there are holiday parties for families with children, but it is Not the Same Thing At All. And I suspect that most people come into close contact with either one version or the other, but not both.
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New Year’s Eve is a little bit like that, although mostly it’s either a matter for a drunken party or it’s a very mild celebration; the First Night activities haven’t really changed that. St. Patrick’s Day, as well, is either celebrated or not celebrated, there really isn’t a second non-alcoholic set of traditions. I suppose that there are two distinct sets of Christmas traditions, one for Catholic and Episcopalian churchgoers, involving Midnight Mass and so on, and one for those Christians who stay at home, but that doesn’t strike me as the same thing; the Christians who go to church also<\/i> do family meal and exchange gifts, for the most part, and the Christians who don’t go to church are (as far as I understand, which is dim indeed) celebrating a subset of the same tradition. I suppose there are people who observe Mardi Gras in some manner that is totally different from Mardi Gras, but I’ve never come across it. Are there other holidays with two such disparate modes of observance?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger observes a duality, although not a duality of self. Shouldn’t there be an emoticon for duality of self<\/i>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18149,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10699\/revisions\/18149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}