{"id":148405,"date":"2025-10-27T20:55:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T20:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/148405\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T20:55:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T20:55:15","slug":"plastic-halloween-bones-will-still-be-around-centuries-after-ours-have-fed-the-earth-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/148405\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic Halloween bones will still be around centuries after ours have fed the Earth \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Halloween<\/a> dioramas are annually more disturbing. Gardens near my house have half-buried skeletons emerging from the lawns, some with shreds of tissue still adhering. Suburban gates guarding freshly gravelled driveways are adorned with severed limbs and nailed heads, blood dripping. I saw skulls on a barbecue yesterday, as if the residents were planning human brains for tea.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like a simulation of a particularly horrifying civil war, scenes too violent for newspapers and television. You\u2019d think the people of suburban Dublin<\/a> were going about their business ignoring continual, open-air mass killing and torture. I like ghost stories, but there\u2019s a line somewhere between spooky and sadistic. <\/p>\n

Call me a killjoy \u2013 after all, I\u2019m not keen on a lot about Christmas<\/a> either \u2013 but it used to be possible to enjoy Halloween and Samhain, to flirt with the supernatural and mark the dark turn of the year, without revelling in fantasies of violence and pain, and certainly without filling our homes and gardens with petroleum-based effigies and instruments of atrocity.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0How we do Halloween is adding to the planet\u2019s mounting graveyard of wasteOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The figures are uncanny partly because they\u2019ll be around so much longer than real bones. Exactly the characteristic that makes them into games or toys, if torture is the game you like to play, makes them more deathly than the real thing. They represent sadism without suffering, dismemberment and execution without pain, because they are made of petrochemical rather than organic material, plastic not flesh. But the joke is on us, because centuries after my bones and yours have fed the Earth, the ones on display in Dublin this week will still be around, haunting the cockroaches and dead electronics in whichever post-apocalyptic scenario you like to imagine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not arguing against the arts of darkness: some of my novels have strong Gothic tendencies and my own childhood party trick was to tell ghost stories so alarming that my friends\u2019 parents would phone my house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone to assure sleepless children that the stories I\u2019d made up weren\u2019t true. (\u201cNot true as in real-life,\u201d I used to say unhelpfully, \u201cbut I wasn\u2019t lying.\u201d) <\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure people have been telling ghost stories as the darkness falls across the high latitudes for about as long as people have had language. The pumpkin-carving is of course as much an American import as the dioramas, pumpkins being among the fruits of colonialism and cultural exchange, but it\u2019s easy enough to connect harvest, All Souls and Samhain. Gather in, hunker down.<\/p>\n

We need our seasonal festivities, perhaps especially as the seasons go awry and many of us feel further and further from organic, bodily rhythms of life. Celebration matters, especially celebration shared among neighbours who may have little in common but proximity, which is not little at all. Chopped and tortured petrochemical bodies seem a questionable form of celebration, especially for those of us who have neighbours recently arrived from places where such things have been done in living memory to real people, people for whom the half-buried bodies of friends and acquaintances and acts of public torture require no simulation. Stories in the news, hard to read and hard to know, are being mimicked for fun in the front rooms and gardens of people who don\u2019t have to bear the reality.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Eight spine-chilling spots around Ireland to visit this HalloweenOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

All Souls Eve has always been a time for thinking about and playing with the ways in which we at once long for and fear the return of our dead. I think there\u2019s a difference between thinking about the power of ghosts and revenants, which is what we do with scary stories and images, and glorying in pain and suffering, which happens in many of the garden dioramas. One recognises our fears of and in the dark, the other celebrates the abuse of others\u2019 bodies. I don\u2019t make the rules around here \u2013 probably just as well \u2013 but the former seems to me deeply human and seasonal and the latter perhaps equally human but nasty.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no accounting for taste, and maybe I\u2019m just out of step, but as we move on from the Day of the Dead I prefer the sight of deliquescing pumpkins on garden walls to the deathless rattle of plastic bones in plastic chains. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Halloween dioramas are annually more disturbing. Gardens near my house have half-buried skeletons emerging from the lawns,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,11850,19,17,28286,2212],"class_list":{"0":"post-148405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-halloween","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-sarah-moss","14":"tag-weekendreview"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115448127565866154","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}