Self
Lise Hand: stop the (Christmas) lights, I want to get off
With Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s and the like, comes a tizzy of souped-up celebrations and extravagant marketing. But can we still defend the right for a day to go uncelebrated in this always-festive climate?
It used to be that Halloween crept up on us, stealthily and unexpectedly, like an axe murderer in a darkened basement. Suddenly, an adult would clock the date – usually a few days before the end of October – and hustle to the shops for a large string bag of monkey nuts and the required number of plastic masks depicting indeterminate bloodied and fanged fiends or crowd-pleasing skeletons.
On the appointed evening, the child would ...
