No link available yet – and anyway, you guys are the sort of classy AB1-demographic types who still go out and pay folding money for quality reading material – but if you pick up the latest edition of the Spectator Australia, you’ll find the Prick’s thoughts on why Australians should stop mucking around with Halloween and instead embrace the American tradition of Thanksgiving:

“Thanksgiving would transplant far better to Australia than Halloween. Even Halloween’s
backers must admit that all that ooglyboogly
Day of the Dead stuff is a hard sell in a country as relentlessly secular as Australia. Utterly ecumenical Thanksgiving, on the other hand, would fit in nicely. The idea is no more complicated than the name implies: be grateful for what you have. And all that’s
required is to front up for a meal.

Plus, it falls at the end of November. A big problem with Christmas in Australia is that by 25 December, it’s too damn hot and after presents the options are limited: stay inside, crank up the aircon and go the traditional roast, or do a Christmas lunch in the sun where everyone gets uncomfortable, sun-struck and drunk too fast. As one who
believes that, at heart, God has a great and vicious sense of humour, the stress of Christmas shopping has surely been arranged as our own self-inflicted punishment for bringing the money changers into the temple and commercialising His son’s birthday.”

Lots of other good stuff in the mag, too.