Everyone ready for Samhain?

As some of you may know, I spent my childhood moving around a lot, and, consequently, I have lived in several different parts of the country. Every place I lived there were always a few who objected to the celebration of Halloween, but for the most part, they were in the minority. Now I live in Georgia, however, and a sizable percentage of the population objects to celebration of Halloween. Due the pressure of evangelical Christians, schools here often celebrate a Fall festival or harvest festival in place of Halloween. They consider it inappropriate for children to be celebrating Halloween in school.

I have thought long and hard about this issue, and I have to say that I completely agree. As every student of history knows, Halloween is Christianity's attempt to co opt a proud and ancient pagan celebration, Samhain. Saimhain is a celebration of the conclusion of the summer harvest, and was marked by communing with the dead and human sacrifice. In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic church tried to squash celebration of Samhain, which it considered heretical, by dropping All Saints Day on top of it. That way one could pray and worship dead saints rather than other non-saint dead people. The name Halloween itself is a contraction of All Hallows Eve, the day before the hallowed day of All Saints Day.

It seems that Halloween has drifted from its roots in Saimhain, and I applaud conservative Christianity's staunch support of tradition. By advocating the return of the harvest festival, they may be taking an unpopular stance, but I admire their conviction. Not many would actively support human sacrifice and necromancy these days, but just because it isn't popular doesn't mean it isn't right!

So join with me and the evangelical Christian community in reviving the harvest festival, Samhain. All hail Samhain, lord of the dead! We will sacrifice many a pagan soul to you this Halloween!

Scratch one invite...

I don't think T.I. will be attending my Christmas party this year.

Rapper T.I. in Custody Until Friday

Since I seem to be one attendee short, I guess you can come this year, Mike D.

How Sarah Ruined Six Flags

By now you have probably read Sarah's account of our group trip to Six Flags last weekend. It's an amusing little tale, but it's also completely false. Oh Sarah got sick alright, but it wasn't from riding any roller coaster. I'm going to hazard a guess that it was the entire bottle of Tequila she downed on the way to the park. It was all down hill from there.

Sarah can be a bit of an angry drunk, and after she "tossed her cookies", Rob tried to comfort her. Big mistake. Sarah took the empty bottle and smashed it on the side of his head. Rob was out cold. Amanda and I bolted. We didn't want to stick around to see the aftermath. Sorry, Rob.

Amanda and I tried to see what we could salvage from this trip by riding a couple of roller coasters when we realized that Rob was our ride! We figured we had better go and find him. After searching for about an hour we found him, still unconscious, in some bushes. I guess Sarah had dumped him there.

Our initial attempts at reviving Rob proved futile. Then we got creative and starting humming the Halo theme music. That did the trick. Rob popped up ready for anything. After spending a few minutes convincing Rob that he was not, in fact, a genetically engineered super soldier (his face was so disappointed), we started to head for the car.

Unfortunately, our consciouses decided to kick in about then, and we started to feel guilty about leaving Sarah. Sure she ruined Six Flags, but should we really leave her behind? So the search began.

We started asking around and heard some rumors about a crazy woman that was terrorizing all of the Georgia Tech freshmen, and, ironically, binging on raw tomatoes. But we had no word on her whereabouts. We sat and thought, "What does Sarah enjoy more than anything?" Why Superman the roller coaster, of course!

We found her there, strapped into the ride, passed out, with a smile on her face. Apparently, after she punched out a staff member, they let her stay on the ride as long as she wanted. So we unhooked her from the ride and tossed her in the trunk for the trip home.