Lewis and Clark

The English don’t do Halloween – at least not the way Americans do. They don’t adorn their houses with fake blood and gore so that the ACLU has to ask them to desist, or so that people mistake real murder victims for holiday decorations. You do occasionally see the English in fancy dress, but they’re not trick-or-treating. They’re UNI students on a pub crawl. The British celebrate Bonfire Night instead. There will be music, fireworks and huge fires tonight to commemorate the day Guy Fawkes almost blew up the British Houses of Parliament. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were Catholics forbidden from practicing their religion by Protestant King James I. So the bonfires are either to celebrate religious freedom or the prevention of mass murder. I’m not sure even the Brits could tell you which, though more than a few were able to recite the beginning of the poem, “Remember, remember the fifth of November…”