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In the English-speaking world, there are two noteworthy celebrations in the fall – Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night.

Halloween is commemorated on the evening of 31 October in Canada and the United States.

In England, Halloween used to be another time for fireworks like Guy Fawkes Night – an evening of lit fuses, sparklers and rockets.Ìý Ìý

Once a much larger celebration, Guy Fawkes is honoured on November 5 in the UK.

Halloween as Canadians have come to know it was formerly a Celtic celebration indicating the division of the light and dark halves of the year, when the boundaries between the living and the dead are thinned for a brief time.

The November holiday, known as Bonfire Night, is a festival in remembrance of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot by Guy Fawkes and his Catholic rebel pals – they planned to blow up the British Parliament during the reign of Protestant King James I on November 5, 1605 and were caught.

Guy Fawkes Night never made it is mark on Canada – possibly because Scottish and Irish immigration dominated this country in contrast to the number of immigrants from other parts of the British Isles in the late in 1800s.

In Commonwealth counties like Australia and New Zealand, the people there also observe Bonfire Night, although Halloween is winning people over as it is in England too, where partiers are dressing in costumes, bobbing for apples and trick-or-treating in the Irish/Scottish traditions followed in North America.ÌýÌýÌý

Guy Fawkes – a gleeful evening of Protestantism, with fireworks, parades, bonfires and effigies of Fawkes (and sometimes the Pope), were trademark symbols on Nov. 5. Meanwhile, Halloween in the UK was formerly a night of tossing fireworks into the streets to frighten people – there weren’t any costumes or treats until the North American customs borrowed from Ireland and Scotland travelled back over the Atlantic then remerged in England since the 1980s.

In British Columbia – once the most British of the Western Canadian provinces – Halloween was also a time for throwing fireworks into people’s front gardens, but along with trick-or-treating and costumed parties. In Vancouver, fireworks will no longer be sold in shops after Nov. 1, 2020.Ìý

Newfoundland and Labrador is the only Canadian province to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night on Nov. 5. The province also has strong Scottish and Irish traditions with an ancient custom followed in December with similarities to Halloween known as mummering.

Visitors attend other homes dressed in costumes and remain as unwelcome guests in Newfoundland and Labrador during the Feast of Stephen at Christmas.

The mummering season – a ritual in the province since the early 1800s – runs through the Feast of St. Stephen beginning on Dec. 26 until the Old Twelfth Day on Jan. 6.

If mummers are welcomed inside a house, they might dance, play music, perform a joke routine or give a recitation before receiving gifts of food and drinks, but the hosts are supposed to guess the identities of the mummers before feeding them.

The Canadian Halloween custom of wearing disguises to ward off bad spirits and offering food to them also originated from Irish and Scottish immigrants and began in the latter part of the 1800s and the 1920s in southern British Columbia and Alberta.

Halloween is said to have grown into a $1 billion industry in Canada since 2014.

In Saskatchewan, public health officials have promised to revisit Halloween guidelines in 2020 as necessary, according to Chief Medical Officer Dr. Shahab, in a statement given on Oct 21.

At this point, trick-or-treating is still allowed in Saskatchewan, but the guidelines could evolve as they had since the early spring of 2020 in Canada.

Winter’s unwelcome early arrival this autumn might prove to be another barrier on Halloween festivities along with COVID, with cold weather expected to reign the forecast until Oct. 25 and possibly beyond.

Thursday’s weather in Saskatchewan on Oct. 22 featured windchills of -11 C with a mean of -3 C. The frozen winds blew from the northwest into Assiniboia and averaged from 15 to 30 kilometres per hour, lasting from the afternoon until the latter part of evening.

By Halloween, the weather was forecasted to lighten-up in Assiniboia with +5 C highs and -1 C lows on Oct. 31 in day and evening along with divergent clouds and sunny breaks – this warming trend of sorts was expected to continue throughout the first week of November after a freezing late October with temperatures fluctuating from -6 C to -15 C.

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