Scary Halloween brings ghosties, but don’t those shopkeepers just love it all!

Japanese men wearing costumes, walk in a street during a Halloween parade in Tokyo on October 29, 2016. PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • Knocking on doors were children with painted faces and pumpkin lanterns demanding money with menaces.
  • Halloween has its origins in pagan festivals when dead people were believed to walk the earth and live ones wore outlandish costumes to keep out of their clutches.
  • Halloween is now the third biggest event for shopkeepers after Christmas and Easter, having displaced Valentine’s Day for lovers.

If you were anywhere in Britain over the past week, you would have seen witches on broomsticks, bone-rattling skeletons, dead people dripping blood while smiling ghastly smiles, hairy spiders scuttling over your feet and blood-sucking bats flitting through the trees of our suburban streets.

Knocking on doors were children with painted faces and pumpkin lanterns demanding money with menaces. And in the supermarkets, the tills were ringing merrily as sales of spooky items swelled the coffers of the retail trade.

All this, of course, was the run-up to Halloween, marked on October 31, whose fun and commercial aspects have been imported from the United States in recent years to huge enthusiasm.

Halloween has its origins in pagan festivals when dead people were believed to walk the earth and live ones wore outlandish costumes to keep out of their clutches.

Christianity changed that. November 1 was declared All Saints Day (or All Hallows Day), a day of special prayer to the saints, and the day before, October 31, became All Hallows Eve (or Halloween), a day to remember those who have gone before us, known in churches as All Souls Day.

In my childhood, we called it “Ducky Apple Night,” when my dad filled a bath of water in which apples bobbed about.

We kids ducked our heads into the water and tried to catch an apple with our teeth. We had to hold our hands behind our backs at all times.

We also made toffee apples and had special sweets but that was about it. We did not go “trick or treating” like today when children dress up and ask for money on the threat of playing a trick on anyone who doesn’t pay.

HORROR MOVIES

The growth of Halloween in Britain has been phenomenal. It is now the third biggest event for shopkeepers after Christmas and Easter, having displaced Valentine’s Day for lovers.

Financial experts estimate that Britons will spend a staggering £400 million-plus this year, compared to £12 million in 2001, on items such as costumes, masks, sweets, alcohol, horror movies and, of course, pumpkins.

The Tesco supermarket chain shifted three million pumpkins last year and expects to do even better this time round. It also predicts sales of more than 200,000 glow-in-the-dark fangs, 170,000 tubes of fake blood and 170,000 witch hats.

One of the reasons for the surging popularity of the spooky season is that those who grew up enjoying Halloween back in the 1980s are now parents and celebrating with their own children.

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Remember little Ben Needham, the English toddler who disappeared 25 years ago from the Greek island of Kos? His mother was convinced he was kidnapped. Not so.

British police have completed a 21-day search during which they found an item believed to have been in the boy’s possession when land where he was staying was being cleared. They believe little Ben was killed accidentally by a large digger. 

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Flexible working, sometimes known as flexitime, is a system which some companies use today to accommodate employees with children for whom regular working hours are not possible.

Forward-looking employers make special arrangements under which working mums, sometimes fathers, can drop off their children at school or nursery, pick them up in the afternoon and be around for their bath and bed time.

OPTIMUM RETURN

That way, a company retains and gets an optimum return from valued skilled workers. But not all employers see it that way.

Kellie Simmons from Manchester worked for a charity in the education sector and at first it allowed her to work from 9.30 am to 4 pm – with reduced pay -- so she could drop off her children at childcare in the morning and see them in the early evening.

But when she asked for an extension for her youngest child, aged 11 months, the company declined and suggested she took a break and came back in six months on her old hours.

Instead, she quit and set up her own business, gambling her life-savings on converting a run-down shop into a beauty salon complete with crèche facilities for infants.

Said Kellie, “It’s early days but it is going well so far. I can handle my kids while still earning decent money.”

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True story sent to a work website.

“I am a mid-level executive and I had to supervise a guy who had a negative view of whatever I did. If I took a day off, he would say I was ‘never there.’ If I praised somebody, he would say, ‘too little, too late.’

“Eventually, he got another job and was fired in six months. He telephoned to inquire if he could have his old job back.

“I asked him, ‘Have you learned anything from this experience?’

“’Yes,’ he said, ‘I should have stayed with your company. You are too indecisive to have ever fired me.’”