Friday was yet another public holiday. I love working because it means that I’m getting a day off (you have to love that kind of logic). Unfortunately this wasn’t the case for Mr Shallot who was needed to work on both Friday and Saturday due to a project coming to a close.
HK is the land of public holidays and this one is the last now until Christmas. This one was for Chung Yeung which seems to have lost some of its original purpose over the years. Now it’s meant to be another time to clean your ancestors’ graves.
These grave cleaning festivals seem to be synonymous with hill fires as incense and other offerings are burnt for the ancestors once their graves are nice and shiny. This time around, there were 95 hill fires. In a place that has plenty of pollution already; it’s a bit surprising that people aren’t more careful with their offerings. All sorts of paper things are burnt such as paper cars, money, pets (all paper) to name a few. The ashes are then caught in the breeze and before you know it, there’s a fire. Perhaps if water bottles were supplied at each cemetery, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.
With that festival finished, Halloween preparations are now in full swing. The fronts of all our buildings have been decorated. Ours has a large hairy spider over the front light and a hanging pumpkin. For some reason, Halloween is big here with even our local supermarket selling costumes for the occasion. We’ve bought chocolate eyeballs to give away to the trick or treaters and I may even dress up Doggy Shallot (she turned two in September).
One positive of celebrating this festival has meant that I haven’t seen many Christmas things for sale as yet. Only in a fabulous stationery store (Papyrus) is Christmas cards already on sale. Interestingly, they are also selling Halloween pens and various other trinkets.
Mr Shallot was here last year prior to Christmas and raved about the fantastic decorations and how the whole place seemed to be in the spirit of things. I’m looking forward to it! Yesterday at the dog park I was chatting with some English people (interestingly they weren’t there this morning after the earlier loss to South Africa in the World Cup) and spoke about how Christmas was celebrated in each of our countries and HK.
The countdown to Christmas festivities is on!
* Thanks to the Fine Young Cannibals for the title to this post. I’ve been listening to some hits from the 80s lately. What happened to these guys?