Thread: Halloween’s Pagan Themes Fill West’s Faith Vacuum

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...ty-shlaes.html

"Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in 10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10 last year, according to a National Retail Federation report.
This is the most in the nine years the NRF has been tracking. In 2011, Americans are also planning to spend more than other years, an average of $72 each. Total outlays by consumers are expected to reach $6.86 billion this fall.
Why the surge in popularity for an ancient harvest ritual? Some of the factors that account for it are as harmless and loveable as a new 12-pound pumpkin from the farm. Others have the capacity to spook."

Pretty worthless article. The author is disjointed and vague at best and the whole piece was too short to cover the wide variety of topics she addresses. She would benefit from citing her sources when making assertions and while I'm not exactly sure where she was going, she managed to irritate me by denigrating beliefs of others simply because they are not religious beliefs as she might define them.

I honestly didn't read the whole article. I skimmed it, and posted it. Thought maybe the poor folks being hit by rain and wind could read it instead of worrying about their poor haunt!

I wonder how many years Amity Shlaes waited all alone for the Great Pumpkin to appear before the poor girl's life was filled with such accusatory confirmation towards Halloween. ha ha ha....

oh well. To be honest, I wrote an essay once in high school comparing Santa to Satan. My teacher was irate, to say the least. I agree with ondeko, however, when stating that this article was vague and disjointed. I could have made a much more profound article connecting the ideas of Halloween and the theories of Carl Jung...... if I really wanted to....which I don't.....

Hollow--I think you and I got caught on the same hook--it could have been a good article and the first paragraph intrigued me enough to get me looking. I think I was most annoyed by the generally poor quality of it overall, something we couldn't know until after plowing through it. I don't mind a well researched article that is anti-Halloween--it just has to have strong basis for the assertions and i want to know where they got their information. It's my training as an historian and anthropologist. I hate it when journalists write stuff like this because I don't know how many or which Americans want it to be Halloween all year long and she never came back to that point anyway. It's as if her editor let her string together a set of introductory sentences for several topics but never let her complete the thought. I like the monetary statistics but because i can't trust anything else she wrote, I won't repeat those numbers to anybody. the worst crime this author committed was having some potential and then just falling so very, very short of the mark. It *could* have been informative or entertaining. But it's neither.

Shadowless--depending n the comparision it could be a good essay. St Nick creeps into your home when you're sleeping and unaware. He knows what you're doing. Pretty sinister stuff