Are chipmunks called the same thing in England? Chips I think are the same as frenchfries (pomfritz?) but potato chips/crisps would be much nicer to wear. lol
When my daughter was in third grade, at the height of what I like to call the Workbook Years, I teased her that I was going to cover a cape with workbook pages and call myself the beast from beneath the bed, or the lost homework monster. Xena
Deep fried or merely toasted? ;P
Yeah, we call chipmunks chipmunks, but that's because we use your word, because we don't have them - they're a New World animal. We only have squirrels (don't have gophers either).
The French call US fries 'frites' and potato chips 'chips' (pronounced 'sheep', though).
The Brits don't do this Hallowe'en thing as much as Americans do - all we had were pumpkin lanterns when we were kids - but the French are into it in quite a big way, with all the shops decorating their windows, and lots of trick or treating going on.
:) Trish
That's interesting, as there is a small piece in the most recent Natioanl Geographic about how Germany has, over the last 10 years, gotten more and more into celebrating Halloween, decorating, etc. They didn't go into elaborate detail, but it made me wonder if there are Halloween costume parties there. Anyone know?
My all-time favorite kind of party is costume! Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati
Its an old tradition in parts of Scotland and is known as 'guising' To earn your treat you have to sing , tell a joke , recite a poem...etc Liz
Hi, I've found this thread very interesting. But, I need just a mask for my oes group contest. Any ideas? i.e.: what it could be, supplies, how to's? tia
I lived in a small German farming village in the 70's. They didn't do the treats, but tricks were everywhere on a night a few days before Halloween. It was called Hexenacht, which I think meant witches night. Some of the younger kids wandered around saying "hexe, hexe" carrying a lantern made of a hollowed out turnip with a face carved in it. The older kids managed to put an old couch on top of the bus stop shelter. It was crazy. Bright yellow American mustard was popular for drawing on car windows and putting on doorhandles, as well as soap... and the dreaded "sheizegummi." sheize=s*it, and gummi=like gummi bears. Hope that's spelled right! Sheizegummi was/is slang for the gunk that results from composting farm garbage with what you get when you muck out the barn. I remember an older woman standing over her compost pit with a shovel, yelling at kids not to get any closer. At that point in history most of the town was not specifically farming, so not everyone had a pit. Compost pits were between the barn and house, and maybe as deep as a person and lined with cobblestones. You could get a lot of gummi in there. ;-)
Xena
It's a leftover from the old (and current) Pagan festival of Samhain. It marks the death of the sun, before he's reborn again at midwinter solstice. The veil between this world and the Summerworld was at its thinnest then so you could commune with the spirits of the ancestors - something like the Mexican Day of the Dead.
Anyway, wicked spirits could also get through the barrier. To guide home the good spirits you placed candles in your windows. To scare off and mislead the bad spirits you carved frightening faces on turnip lanterns and left them at crossroads. Someone must have realised that pumpkins are a great deal easier to carve than turnips so pumpkin lanterns became popular. The tricks were also to confuse the bad spirits and were once widely performed in England, before they died out. We used to have Mischief Night here in Yorkshire when I was a kid, about 35 years ago, when you performed pranks like drawing on windows with soap, but it was coming to an end then. It's coming back now in the form of trick-or-treating adopted from the US.
Like so many Pagan festivals, it got taken over by the Christian church. They realised that there was no way to stop people celebrating so they told them that, instead of celebrating the death of the sun, they were celebrating All Saint's Day.
Sally Holmes Not a Pagan, not a Christian, just amused at the way religions subsume each other.
Fascinating, Sally and Xena!
Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati
Here's an easy idea for a Cow: Add black spots to a white sweatsuit, add ears on a head band or hood. You can do almost any animal costume with a sweatsuit. Just adapt to whatever animal you like - cotton balls (or pompons) glued on for a lamb, large pink sweats stuffed with pillows and corkscrew tail for pig, etc.
I also have some links on my site that include free directions for an angel, leopard, magician, princess, ghost and more.
Halloween Costumes & Projects - Sew and No-Sew
~Lisa snipped-for-privacy@bellaonline.com
This is so true! I made one of my sons an "Indian" costume for a school play (a long time ago) by buying a sweat shirt and sweat pants in a thrift store, dying them brown (for a leather look) with Rit, and then cutting "fringe" on the bottoms of the shirt and pants. From 30 feet away, it looked good! LOL!
Hey! Thanks!! I need to make my son an Indian for his Awana club around Thanksgiving....was going to actually get a pattern and do it, but this is SO much easier and quicker!!
Larisa
Joanne wrote:
Cool! You can string pony beads on some of the "fringes" and/or paint some designs on it. It makes a great costume, and can later be used for jammies.
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