Churches attempt to take 'the dark side' out of Hallowe'en - Telegraph

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While thousands of children take to the streets dressed as witches and ghouls, parishes are planning alternative celebrations. All Saints Church in Ecclesall, Sheffield, will hold a communion service by candlelight which will include a discussion of “Goth culture”. Several parishes in Wiltshire and Dorset will be sending children out to into their local neighbourhoods to give sweets away, instead of knocking on doors threatening tricks and demanding treats. The initiatives are intended to reclaim All Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints Day, as a time for celebration and religious reflection. The Rev Harry Steele, who is leading the Uncut Project at All Saints Ecclesall, acknowledged that a candle-lit graveside service on Halloween could cause a stir. “I guess some people could find it a little unusual, but it is causing them to think,” he said. “I hope that people recognise it for what it is - a celebration of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. “There are lots of young people who go around on Halloween dressed up, having fun, and knocking on doors in the community. “We thought that it is a good idea to have fun too, and to get to know people in our community as well - it is just we want to do it by celebrating light instead of darkness.” Mr Steele said the rise in popularity of “Emo” and “Goth culture” showed that the pressures of modern life had “a profound effect” on teenagers and children. “We want to hear the lyrics in that music and the prose of the authors and think about what they say in relation to the truth of the words of Jesus Christ,” he said. A number of parishes in Dorset and Wiltshire will be celebrating All Saints’ Eve, holding special services and children’s parties as an alternative to Halloween. Becky Sedgwick, from the Devizes Partnership of Churches, said many local church children do not want to celebrate Halloween. “We’re trying to host a credible alternative that’s that children can invite their friends to, with all the nice elements of Hallowe'en but none of the dark side of it,” she said. “We’re bringing a message of hope and light instead of scary masks and horror stories.”

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Awwww Boooo!

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unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

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Chalk-faced, black-garbed and festooned with piercings, the world's goths are assembling this weekend in the picture postcard seaport of Whitby. Once famous for fishing, and the synod of 664 that decided the future of the English church, the Yorkshire town has embraced its more recent calling as the world capital of gothdom. English Heritage has given the official seal of approval for this year's 17th Whitby Gothic Weekend, altering the floodlights in the town's ruined abbey (central to Bram Stoker Dracula plot) to beam purple and orange for the event. The abbey has hired falconers to send birds of prey swooping through the ruins before dusk, while actors will demonstrate a bed of nails and conduct a full-scale, twilit Victorian funeral, with black-plumed horses and mutes. English Heritage's regional events manager, Jon Hogan, said the abbey had nearly 1,000 years of history, but it was Stoker and other Victorian romantics who had put it firmly on the international map. "For many visitors to Whitby today it is the Victorian influence that guides their understanding of the site. The ruin remains largely unchanged from the time when it was inspiring authors such as Stoker," he said. "Our displays portray and explain the Victorians' fascination with death and the macabre. Their funeral displays were often even more elaborate than wedding ceremonies." Goths coming to Whitby have been issued with maps showing everything from tattoo parlours to the Pandemonium goth shop, whose current bestsellers include purple "barbed wire" bangles and skull-and-crossbones studs. Stickers for sale read "Who says I want to fit in?". But these belie the amicable, and prosperous, relations between the local residents and their exotic visitors. Concern at the first couple of goth weekends in the 1990s is long forgotten, and the church condemnation at the time retracted. Hotels and B&Bs have been booked months in advance, with a rise of non-gothic visitors coming to enjoy the spectacle. The gathering's friendliness has been credited with relaxing attitudes elsewhere in the world. The weekend held in 2007 was dedicated to Sophie Lancaster, the young goth murdered by a gang in Bacup, Lancashire, supposedly because she and her boyfriend, who was seriously injured in the attack, were "different". Fundraising benefited Whitby's hospice and paid for planting trees and for a bench in memory of the 20-year-old student. For this weekend, bands from across the world are lined up and the audience will include several 80-year-olds with black eye make-up, as well as a crecheful of goth babies. The future of the goth weekend was queried this year after its spring counterpart, held in April, drew smaller crowds than expected and left organisers about £6,000 out of pocket. But Whitby is now on course for an even biggest concentration of mock-horror in October 2011, when three separate Gothic bonanzas are expected to coincide. The official weekend's organiser, Jo Hampshire, will announce her dates on Sunday after discussions about the Bram Stoker international film festival, which has booked the town's main venue, the Pavilion, for Halloween. A spin-off event from the Whitby weekend could also set up its stall for the first time, raising the prospect of nearly three weeks of vampires, gothic sandcastle-building and traditional football fixtures between visiting goth teams and local sides. The combination could rival the drawing power of Whitby's other great tourist attraction, Captain James Cook, who was apprenticed to a shipowner whose home on the harbour front is now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum. More than 100,000 people lined the port to welcome in a replica of the explorer's ship, Endeavour, in 2003.

Whitby goth festival draws a black-clad crowd | UK news | The Guardian

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