MACNAS HALLOWEEN PARADE IN DUBLIN

This event was not at all easy to photograph so I decided to have a bit of fun with some of the images. Hopefully the images will give you all a feel for the event.


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HALLOWEEN PARADE BY MACNAS - DUBLIN CITY CENTRE 2017

Macnas is a performance company based at the Fisheries Field in Galway, Ireland. Its public performances are noted for exuberance, colour and spectacle. The company has been influential in changing the nature of public entertainment in Ireland.

 Halloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of All Hallows' Evening), also known as Allhalloween, All Hallows' Eve, or All Saints' Eve, is a celebration observed in a number of countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.

 It is widely believed that many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain; that such festivals may have had pagan roots; and that Samhain itself was Christianised as Halloween by the early Church.

Some believe, however, that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, separate from ancient festivals like Samhain. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories and watching horror films. In many parts of the world, the Christian religious observances of All Hallows' Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead, remain popular, although elsewhere it is a more commercial and secular celebration. SaveSave

HALLOWEEN PARADE IN DUBLIN [PHOTOGRAPHED USING SONY 70-200 GM LENS]

Halloween centrepiece the upside-down world, a Macnas spectacular, took over a portion of the north inner city as the end-of-festival event of Dublin’s Bram Stoker Festival.

Here in Ireland when I was young it was said that the souls in Purgatory were released to visit their still mortal friends. Long ago the country folk before they retired  to bed on this night [31 October] prepared a blazing fire and a well swept hearth to welcome their unearthly visitors.

Every year my contacts in the US ask me do we celebrate Halloween in Ireland. As they appear to believe that Halloween is American they are usually surprised when I answer that we do and that we have being do so for longer than the US has existed. Of course it is a bit more complicated than that because Halloween as we now celebrate it here is now very much Americanised. For obvious reasons we do not celebrate Guy Faulks  [bonfire night] here in Ireland so we have fireworks and bonfires at Halloween instead.

My friends from outside Ireland are even more surprised when I tell that Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula.

A free booklet about Halloween is available at http://www.duchas.ie/download/15.10.23-halloween.pdf