The Humor of Holidays

I need a scanner.

Halloween would seem to be a great time to launch my Guys in Robes comic strip.  The quasi-pagan origins and popular mythology tying the holiday to Satanism would make it easy to compose the first few strips, and then the onslaught of of the mid-winter holidays would allow me to maintain momentum.  Alas, the economic downturn has affected even the web comic industry, forcing hard choices.  Given how much the kids squawk if they don’t get fed the scanner may have to wait for the after holiday discounts.

Maybe it’s the mists of memory, but Halloween seemed to be a bigger deal when I was a child, o lo those many decades ago.  I remember packs of becostumed munchkins roaming far and wide, filling pillowcases with tooth-rotting goodness and generally running wild.  Now we’re lucky to have a couple of dozen trick or treaters come to our suburban neighborhood.  With All Hallows on a Friday I’m hoping for a better turnout this year; it looks like the weather may cooperate.

The transformation of the Halloween party into a “Fall Party” or “Harvest Party” in schools is just amusing to me.  For 364 days a year the Conservative Christian movement howls about allowing religion to be taught in schools, and arguing that we should “teach the controversy” about creationism (intelligent design’s true face) vs. evolution. Yet when a school wants to permit a social activity only notionally connected to another belief system, suddenly ‘religion has no place in school’ and it is ‘harmful for the children.’  Remember this commotion in eight weeks when these same voices start complaining how Christmas break morphed into winter break.

This entry was posted on 27. October 2008 at 09:54 and is filed under Geek, Religion, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.