Tuesday, October 31, 2006

A Sop to the Mad Priest



(who is still on about it!) and what may well be the last Hallowe'en post of the year (thanks to Moonbootica, another Brit, for the link).

What is it about the French?

It seems the festival, which came to prominence in the late 1990s, is in decline because it is perceived as "too American".

An association called No to Halloween - which was set up to combat the trend - has now wound down as a result of the festival's waning appeal.

It said Halloween was artificially inflated to serve commercial interests.

"There was no need for the group to exist any more," former president Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin told Reuters news agency.

"Halloween was a marketing gimmick aimed mainly at children. It's a big festival of consumption selling outfits, masks, gadgets and it couldn't last forever," he added.

As a result, supermarkets are reported have lost interest in the festival this year.

"Apart from a few local celebrations, Halloween is no longer taken into account by our stores," Thierry Desouches of Systeme U supermarket told Catholic newspaper La Croix.

"This lack of interest is real in all big-name supermarkets," he added.

"Our Halloween sales have been falling by half every year since 2002," Franck Mathais of toy retailer La Grande Recre told Le Monde newspaper.
I mean, how dare they be so sensible? And after what we did for them in WWII, too!

Arrogance, I call it.

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