The End Of The Craze

With great pleasure I have noticed, during the Years Of The Couf, that the Halloween pagan rite was rapidly receding.

This Year Of The Lord 2022 was the first year since 2019 that life was totally unaffected by the Virus Craze. It was, therefore, a very interesting test of where we are with this.

The results were excellent. The trade has basically ignored the entire thing, evidently considering it not worth it to redo the shop window and launch “special offers” to sell their consumerist rubbish. It was a total flop.

Yesterday evening I went for a stroll to the same shopping centre where I had been observing, year after year, the Pagan Craze (a big concentration of shops gives you a much faster way to take the temperature of the real situation).

You would not have thought it was, in fact, Halloween.

It seems to me that we are now back to where we were several years ago, before the craze began: a misguided ritual for children looking for sweets and, more often than not, being fed this stuff instead of the Four Last Things.

I salute this development. It marks a little step towards normality.

Now, if our clergy would put a bit more energy in reminding the population that today is All Saints and tomorrow All Souls, perhaps we could make some more progress.

But you see, I think they are afraid of not being nice. This saints stuff is so non-inclusive that it would be difficult, for a bishop, to explain what it is without getting into some detail as to what is necessary to be among the saints.

Still, one must be happy for little joys.

I don’t think the Halloween Craze will ever go back. It flared, it started to recede, then it was kicked in the butt by the Couf, and now it seems to have gone back to square one.

Today is the feast of All Saints. Let’s hope this feast resounds more and more in the public square in the years to come. But we’ll need a new and much better pope for this.