halloween is each day

[eric65]

just remember although they say it is thanksgiving each day is in fact halloween the true creator whom is like the grim reaper the true creator with his scythe is retrieving all of us each day as he wishes to exist as one all him again as he made himself in the begining as one before he was divided by the true rebellious one so please remember that each day is halloween the true creator ween-ing us from the hallow-ed peace

[poomi]

Discussion groups about Halloween I think would be interesting. Hardly the blood pumping experience most are looking for, I know. Telling ghost stories is great fun. Watching a master storyteller working is beyond compare. I think the art of oral storytelling needs to be brought back, especially in regards to Halloween which has such a great legacy of storytelling.

[MauEvig]

Halloween is an amazing holiday and it's definitely my favorite; no doubt about that. But I think if Halloween were every single day, it wouldn't be special anymore. What makes a holiday special is taking that one day out of the year and adding a bit of extraordinary to it. It makes life a little less boring. Sure there are specific things that might remind me of Halloween; there's the "Little Halloween" celebrations thought up by one of our members here; but after watching Christmas Specials where it's Christmas every day you start to realize that it loses it's flavor after a while. Part of the excitement is the build up for it. I like the idea of participating in other culture's versions of a "Death Day" or "Death Week" or even turning Halloween into a Month Long or Week long celebration. But I'm not sure I'd want it to be Halloween each day and every day. If it was, I think I'd start to miss the other Holidays and it would just get boring. It's just like enjoying the same candy bar every day. Eventually you'll lose the taste for it.

[Murfreesboro]

If every day were playing holiday,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.


--Prince Hal's soliloquy in First Henry the Fourth--Act 1, scene ii, IIRC

(1HIV is my favorite favorite favorite Shakespearean play; I have most of it memorized)

[MauEvig]

Nice quote. Though I never really got into Shakesphere too much. Couldn't get passed all the thees and thous. Then again I sort of had a hard time reading the King James version of the Bible as well.

No doubt he was an influential playwright though. Technically didn't he say that you could only tell 7 stories and otherwise they were all the same?

Anyway, I look forward to holidays but I wouldn't want them to become every day occurrences. When it's time to get the decorations out of the attic, that's when the excitement starts to build until the day Halloween gets here. Doesn't mean I can't plan and prepare though. After all it never hurts to plan ahead. With Halloween on a Saturday this year I'd like to have a party or something. That would be cool.

[Murfreesboro]

Shakespeare never wrote any critical commentary outside his plays themselves, so whoever said that about however many plots there are (and I've heard something like it, too) was not Shakespeare.

I believe you would love Shakespeare if you could ever see him performed by people who know how. Something I did with my older son when he was 12 turned out to be a fantastic way to get into Shakespeare. My boy came home from school asking me to teach him Hamlet, because he had heard his English teacher talking about that play. Instead of making him read it, which is the English professor's way (and I used to be one of those people), I was lazy and went to the video store (we still had video stores then) and checked out every copy of Hamlet I could find. We watched several of them. Our ground rule was, Everyone who plays Hamlet wants to do his best work, so we are not going to put down anyone's performance or interpretation. Instead, we are going to ask, "Why did he do it like that? What difference does it make to our understanding of the character?" You could extend that question to the way the play was set, or to any cuts made. We had a blast, and by the end of a couple of weeks, my son was totally hooked. He started collecting Shakespeare on film (he's a big Branagh fan, and adores Derek Jacobi, who frequently worked with Branagh), and both his younger brother and sister became "infected" with the Shakespeare bug. My second son, when a middle school football player, said, "Even jocks can love Shakespeare." My daughter, now 17, wants to run off to England to play Shakespeare on stage (a dubious consequence of her falling for the Bard, that she thinks she wants to be an actress).

My point is, don't read Shakespeare. Watch Shakespeare being played. Pick a popular play and watch it in as many different presentations as you can find. You will discover Shakespeare.

If you are interested at all in Shakespeare as a person, seek out the four-part Michael Wood documentary, In Search of Shakespeare. It will put to rest forever any theory you have ever heard that Shakespeare didn't write his plays. It will also inform you prodigiously about the political scene of Elizabethan & Jacobean England.