| The Hallowed Eve: Dimensions of Culture in a Calendar Festival in Northern Ireland Contributor(s): Santino, Jack (Author) |
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ISBN: 0813192455 ISBN-13: 9780813192451 Publisher: University Press of Kentucky OUR PRICE: $14.25 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2009 Annotation: Halloween is such a major celebration in Ireland that it is often called the Irish Christmas, a day of family reunions, meals, and fun. In America, many of our contemporary traditions are thought to have been brought over by Irish immigrants. But Northern Irish Halloween traditions today are nearly the opposite of American ones, with the emphasis on storytelling, family fireworks, and community bonfires rather than on pranks and peer-group activities. Halloween has become the one safe haven in this troubled country when social conflict is set aside. Although current folk and popular traditions have the potential to be interpreted in divisive terms, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that this holiday must remain free from sectarianism. Halloween in Northern Ireland provides an ideal model of how life could be. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Holidays (non Religious) - History | Europe - Ireland - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social |
| Dewey: 394.264 |
| Series: Irish Literature, History, and Culture |
| Physical Information: 0.41" H x 5.5" W x 8.5" (0.52 lbs) 184 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Ireland - Cultural Region - British Isles - Ethnic Orientation - Irish - Holiday - Halloween |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In Northern Ireland, Halloween is such a major celebration that it is often called the Irish Christmas. A day of family reunions, meals, and fun, Halloween brings people of all ages together with rhyming, storytelling, family fireworks, and community bonfires. Perhaps most important, it has become a day that transcends the social conflict found in this often troubled nation. Through the extensive use of interviews, The Hallowed Eve offers a fascinating look at the various customs, both past and present, that mark the celebration of the holiday. Looking through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation, Jack Santino examines how the traditions exist in a nonthreatening, celebratory way to provide a model of how life could be in Northern Ireland. Halloween, concludes Santino, is a marriage of death and life, a joining of cultural opposites: indoor and outdoor, domesticity and wildness, male and female, old and young. Although current folk and popular traditions can be divisive, Halloween in Northern Ireland is universally considered to belong to everyone, regardless of their background or political leanings. The holiday is a dramatic example of how a community comes together one day a year, and these Northern Irish traditions capture the fundamental and everyday dimensions of life in Ulster. |
