The hallowed eve dimensions of culture in a calendar festival in Northern Ireland / Jack Santino.

Includes bibliographies and index.

The Irish Christmas -- The personality of the season: rhyming, pranking, and bonfires -- Harvest -- The Feast of Autumn -- Oiche Shamhana, Night of the Spirits -- Tie the nine knots: games, divination, and belief -- Gender construction and cultural hegemony in Northern Ireland.

In Northern Ireland, Halloween is such a major celebration that it is often called the Irish Christmas. A day of family reunions, meals, and fun, Halloween brings people of all ages together with rhyming, storytelling, family fireworks, and community bonfires. Perhaps most important, it has become a day that transcends the social conflict found in this often troubled nation. Through the extensive use of interviews, The Hallowed Eve offers a fascinating look at the various customs, both past and present, that mark the celebration of the holiday. Looking through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation, Jack Santino examines how the traditions exist in a nonthreatening, celebratory way to provide a model of how life could be in Northern Ireland. Halloween, concludes Santino, is a marriage of death and life, a joining of cultural opposites: indoor and outdoor, domesticity and wildness, female and male, young and old.

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