Halloween aka Hallowe’en is celebrated each year on 31 October.  According to the ancient Celtic calendar, it was observed as the last day of each year, when all witches and warlocks were absent. After the introduction of Christianity, it was taken over as the eve (even or e’en) of All Hallows or All Saints. By the 20th Century it became what we know now as a great party occasion in our social calendar. 

Yesterday, I went for a walk around our neighborhood and saw a couple of houses adorned and ready for tonight’s’ Halloween Trick or Treat festivities. Mostly, there was an over-abundance of fake cobwebs, big plastic spiders and/or pumpkin faces, but I laughed out loud when I saw on the front lawn of one house two fake tombstones with R.I.P. inscribed and in front of them a pair of hands poking out through the grass lawn in front of each stone. (Took me back to my early days when my father took me to the movies to see those sensational B-Grade vampire movies, where we would laugh our way through until we had tears streaming down our faces).

It was also back in “the good old days” when we would hand-carve a pumpkin and put a candle in the middle to light-up to produce an eerie effect and/or perform massive acts of ‘misconduct’ and suffering mother’s ire by ‘mucking up’ or cutting up the white sheets to make peep-holes in our ghostly attire costumes for the night.

The graphics shown here are from “Graffik; a Canberra based street artist collective; who have provided original, large-scale murals and signs which have transformed commercial and residential walls into eye-catching features.  Every few months the walls around the  Canberra CBD are updated with different themes, which may vary from the Multicultural Festival, Winter in the City, Floriade and/or Christmas in the City to name but a few.