Halloween Hellations
Then there’s the whole harvest thing too with ties to the Irish Celtic festival Samhain, meaning summer’s end and sooo really we don’t have a definitive ancestry for the ghouls and ghosties of Halloween.
However us Brits tend to celebrate another evening more widely around the same time. Guy Fawkes night which is 5th November and is about that naughty toad who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. We celebrate with burning his effigy on a bonfire (how lovely?) cooking jacket potatoes in the embers, drinking mulled wine and setting off fireworks.
But enough about all that. With the advent of Halloween comes the usual jokes of “no need to dress up in this household as a witch” jokes and “pretty ghoul here already” and “you won’t be needing any make up as a zombie” etc etc. Here is where the connection becomes shaky to say the least.
Several friends and family over the last year have had milestone Birthdays and I’ve heard a lot of very positive comments like “40 is the new 20” and “I don’t feel any different from when I was 25”. I too have been guilty of saying “don’t feel bad about your age, you look fabulous, which really amounts to saying “gosh you are old aren’t you, but luckily you’re not showing it much”.
This is where I suddenly thought, I do feel differently from when I was 20 and yes whilst I am very recognizable to my 20 year old self, I have changed mentally and emtionally. It is in fact all rather ok. I don’t even want to be doing the things I was doing at twenty. Well maybe I do, riding all weekend long and partying to the wee hours, but then the trade off is I am not plagued with the oh hell I need to sort my life out, like what, where and when.
The realization is, the only thing I want again from my youth is time, I think Michael Kors remarked the other day “as I grow older I realize the only luxury is time”. And he’s absolutely right, with one exception of course, a SoffiaB dressing gown, hah, you knew I’d sneak in a reference somehow.
But yes, time is what I think we really all mean when we say these platitudes about age and aging, we’d like more time, because at 20 most of us think we’re immortal and perhaps if we’d known then we might have used our time more wisely. And that can be read both ways, yes maybe you wouldn’t have fried in the sun for hours on end, but maybe you should have eloped with the polo player from Argentina or taken that huge career risk ……?
So have a lovely Halloween regardless of whether you are celebrating your dead, your harvest or your peanut M&Ms and for those across the pond have a mulled wine or two for me!
Look Gorgeous, Feel Fabulous - Sophie