Festive Occasions

Today is October 25, meaning I have two soon-to-arrive occasions to mention. First of all, as many of you may know due to me spouting it worriedly for about two weeks, my older brother is going to be of-age in 5 days. The second of-age. Or the third, counting driving age. (Forgive this mode of talking about reaching age limits; I made up a full system of turning of-ages this morning for my story.) Don’t you think it’s interesting how age matters so much to us? I do. We allow young people to subsequently drive, vote, and have the choice to smoke and drink by age, even though some mature earlier and some much, much later. But what can we do about it? There has to be some way of judging adequacy, correct?


And then there’s the little bit about how adults generally think their intellect is superior to that of young people. No matter that I’ve heard some really ridiculous things out of adults and some very sound things out of kids/teenagers. I happen to think it’s nice that we can be idealist and dream about things that adults dismiss as impossible because they’re too weighed down with all the responsibilities of being adults. Now if the knowledge/experience of the adults could be combined with the idealism of youth…that might produce something productive, wouldn’t you say?

So that’s my small bit of age-talk for today, disregarding the fact that when your only sibling starts to pass milestones you should be very, very worried.

Now, the next occasion is Halloween. I once heard a Brit say that they thought it was strange that kids would go to strangers’ houses and ask for candy and that it sounded like an Americanized form of begging. Did you ever think about how people from far off might think our traditions were totally crazy? I mean, I take Halloween as a fact of October, but apparently that’s not so.

Well, personally I enjoy Halloween, because the candy aspect makes it much easier to forget Halloween is like…a…death…holiday…thing. And it’s nice when you’re little to go around for a night pretending you’re a princess or a Jedi or a ninja dude or a cat. Rudiments of acting, eh? And it feels good to give candy out and make some small child happy. Plus if you know your neighbors it isn’t really to strangers.

On the other hand, when you’re older and you don’t go trick-or-treating and you don’t stay at home handing out candy, what are you to do? It becomes less of a holiday and more of a sit-around-and-be-bored-and-scare-small-children sort of a day. This totally removes the point of it, for the small children at least.

Be as that may, back to the traditions topic. I for one may be going over to the other side of the world over Winter Break. They don’t celebrate Christmas over there! I don’t even know if there’ll be snow! And certainly no Christmas tree, and no fancy-wrapped presents, and no music on the radio. It makes you think about other traditions we don’t know about and how people over the world think our celebrations are weird and us not having some of their holidays is sad. We don’t even know a lot about other people, even in our own countries (I’ve heard some strange things about a certain universal topic for people from our state from people out-of-state). We need to raise cultural awareness so we can be more easily accepting and understand why people have these traditions. I’m opting for a culture class, not just one language with culture (for instance, I take French). I think it would help us all a lot, worldwide. Isn’t that what we want, peace and understanding?



A note to my poor readers…My blog seems to be for thought-producing-exploring purposes. As such, only a few have been really well organized. I apologize for that…I will try to do better in the future.