From the You’re Two Months Too Early department:
Ecuadorean president, Rafael Correa, called on the people of Ecuador to reject Halloween because the holiday encourages consumerism. He used the day of free candy for kids to hurl a softball insult toward America and other English-speaking countries saying that the holiday “has been deformed by consumerism, including in the United States.”
Correa has been trying (though, sometimes questionably) to do what’s best for the people of Ecuador since being elected in 2006, but to use Halloween, of all holidays, as another excuse to single out America as the perpetrator of consumer evil seems like a reach and a cheap tactic to rally the people of your country against something rather than for something. America has been guilty of economically ravaging Ecuador throughout recent history, but this kind of rhetoric on Halloween?!?
Correa calls himself a Christian leftest, so it will be interesting what he has to say later this year as that holiday with the guy who sneaks down chimneys draws nearer.
(International Herald Tribune)
November 1st, 2007 at 1:42 am
I’m down with boycotting Halloween on general principle. Being creepy and weird is a luxury I choose to take advantage of year-round and see no reason to save up for one arbitrary day.
What I think Correa might not understand is that Halloween is pretty far down in the noise when it comes to the consumerism (but I don’t need to tell you, you got it in the headline. Everyone knows the buying frenzy that happens on New Year’s Eve )
I’m curious (and I’m sure somebody in the confectionary industry somewhere has compiled the numbers at one point or another) if Halloween or Easter gets the most candy sales.
Requisite links:
Was Daylight Savings Time extended to sell more candy?
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/an-extra-hour-of-daylight-thank-the-candy-lobby/index.html?hp
Buy Nothing Day (start thinking about it now)
https://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd//
November 1st, 2007 at 10:18 am
YAAA!!!! Get away from my Halloween!
Oh well, I live with it daily here. Texans/Baptists don’t like Halloween and make it in to a day to rant about abortion. Yeah, how that ties in is beyond me, too. But they love staging Hell Houses, complete with bloody scalpels (or coat hangers?) and fallen women.
They also don’t like any connection to the bunny on Easter (it’s all about hanging on the cross, dammit!) and you’d better not put jolly Santa in the yard come Dec. Santa is obviously the devil in his red suit with tempting presents in his bulging sack.
Anyway, my point was- them fur’iners can get out of our holidays, I have coping to do with the homegrown idiots