Spooky Season Week, Day 1!

The Spooky Season is how I prefer to refer to Halloween, or in the case of some people, the entirety of October! It has a little bit of alliteration, which I love, and in my opinion, it is just overall a better name. Also, it allows for the event to be more than a one day thing, and some people would really love for Halloween to last for multiple days, if not the whole of October.

I have never been a big Halloween person, I don't tend to get into it very much, but to be fair, I think Halloween in the UK is generally more low-key than Halloween in other places, such as America. The most I might do is carve a pumpkin, but I do that more because I like making pumpkin soup than because I want to make a cool design and put a candle in it. I have never been trick or treating (gasp! I know, the scandal!) but it is not a big thing in my area anyway. Last year, we had no trick or treaters. The year before, we had one knock at the door, and it was a group of teenagers, not dressed up, who each took one sweet from us, incredibly politely, and went on their way.

But, there are some things I do every Halloween, and they are the following:

1) Decide upon an incredibly lazy costume, usually coming up with something based on what I am already wearing. One time, I found a sticker that had the number 13 on it, so I stuck it to my forehead and announced I was going to be Friday the 13th for that Halloween.

2) Watch a film with my family, although it is rarely scary (as I have a young brother). Last year we watched Ghostbusters.

3) Make up finger puppet stories with my brothers, which generally consists of a torch at one end of the room, and us moving closer or further from the light to create bigger and smaller shadows. Someone usually sits by the light and has a massive hand claw shadow that eats all the other shadows.

4) Eat far too many sweets, as we always buy a pack of cheap sweets in case this is the year we are swamped with trick or treaters, but end up eating them all ourselves. So by the end of the evening, I generally feel rather sick.

This year, though, as I now have a blog, I decided I would do something for the Spooky Season. Some people are doing Blogtober, but I rarely have posts ready for just posting twice a week, so posting every day in a month was something that would backfire on me instantly. But, if I tried, surely I could do a Spooky Week? I would have plenty of time to prepare, and I could write some spooky stories, review some scary movies... so here we are!

Samhain is apparently where Halloween started. It was a Celtic festival, where people would dress up in animal heads and skins, and burnt sacrifices on a bonfire for the Celtic deities. It was thought to be the time when the lines between the worlds of the living and the dead blurred, and ghosts would roam free again. It was about protecting yourselves from the coming winter months, and from anything supernatural that may be lurking about.

Eventually, this was taken over by other cultures and religions, and became more of a celebration to honour the dead, and people started to dress up more, instead of wearing animal heads. This eventually became an amalgamation of all the different events, until it turned into what we now know as Halloween.

There, you've had a little history lesson!

And so, I will leave this post here, as a little introduction into my Spooky Season Spooky Week! Stay tuned for the rest of the week to find some movie and book reviews, and some creepy stories that I have written!

(I'll be Tweeting about my posts, so follow me on Twitter!)

You don't know how much trouble I had with this post – I can't spell Halloween properly! I always miss out one of the L's!

Anyway...

Bye!