Halloween

Hallowe’en – it never went away you know…

| Readers 1887

 Keith Williamson is a History and Politics teacher in County Down Hallowe’en is a seasonal reminder that the older gods confound the new. To win souls for Christ, the Early Medieval Church expropriated some of the popular festivals of the Gauls and the Celts. Given that conversion was mostly a top-down affair, preachers courted the favour of kings and accommodations were hatched. Ancient polytheistic rites based on the sun’s cyclic light were thereby conjoined with a 4th century Christian tradition …

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Haunting Of Queen’s University Halls?

| Readers 3454
chamber, chair, mirrors

Back in the 1990s when I was a first-year student at Queen’s I lodged in one of the brutalist Soviet-style 1960s tower blocks known as the Elms halls of residence located just off the leafy Malone Road. During the week the area was a hive of activity, a self-contained student village where countless tomfoolery, pranks, romantic liaisons, all-night parties and all kinds of alcohol-fuelled debauchery and hedonism abounded – just as you would expect to find at any university campus …

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A Halloween Horror Story – The Old Schoolhouse…

| Readers 1274

You could just about see the roof of the old building, jutting out from behind a crooked tree, and I never believed my granny when she said that it’d once been the parish school – it was tiny. Barely a bungalow, with a few windows and an outhouse. Ginger told me that the last year of admissions was 1974, but that all the local children had gone there… including one in particular. The Big Man would call into my grandmother’s …

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This Halloween spare a thought for the forgotten turnip…

| Readers 2848

As we approach Halloween, we should remind ourselves that as a people who have fought and continue to fight to preserve our rich cultural heritage protecting cultural traditions going back hundreds of years, it is with irony that one observes this week a cultural tradition that the Irish exported to the United States, now being exported back to us in a watered down ‘Americanised’ form which we now accept as our own culture without any of the rich cultural heritage …

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Mount Stewart Festival of Light

| Readers 1508

I loved the Enchanted Evening events they used to run in Botanic Gardens as part of the Belfast Festival. They were, for us, easy to get to, compact, beautiful, mysterious and fun. It has been a sore point for me that they have been absent from the Festival programme for the last couple of years, although this year’s lovely Havannas event from Catalonia did somewhat make up for it. Regardless, I decided to book tickets for the National Trust Mount …

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