So, I just had a bit of a meltdown.  Having had very little response from my questionnaire and no response at all from putting it on the Caithness.org forum, I sat staring at the computer, screaming "I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail!"

Panic now over.

I have purchased a month's subscription with SurveyMonkey and think that will help get people to fill in the questionnaire. 

I feel as though I have turned a page in Dissertation Creation.  I also feel chilled.  Peace.

In other news, the non-Caithness parts of the dissertation (history etc) are going down a treat.

Quick Update...

... report has been submitted.  See?  There's nothing like an incentive!!

Inability to do ongoing assessments. And a good incentive...

I really must get my report in today.  No question.  It's now really overdue and I think my supervisor would be well within his rights to start hounding me for it at any moment.

I've actually started writing the dissertation paper itself, which was my plan for the beginning of March so there's no reason at all why I should have fallen behind on the reports!  I also have a really comprehensive plan for the parts of my dissertation that have yet to be written and I'm still gathering lots of exciting primary data.  I have absolutely no excuse apart from the fact that I am notoriously bad at ongoing assessments. 

I'm a great believer in incentives so I hereby vow: if I don't get the report in today, detailing what point I am at now in terms of dissertation creation, then I will spend all of tomorrow (including when I'm at work) wearing the skeleton costume that I purchased for last year's Halloween.  It's topical, after all!

Halloween Food... and bats

One of the things that defines many festivals are the foods that go along with it.  Christmas has cake, pudding and Yule Log (to name a few); Easter has eggs (obviously!); birthdays have cake with candles...

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that Halloween too has some foods that I will always associate with it.  For as long as I can remember, my family have made "Dustbread Biscuits" on Halloween:

"Dustbread" is actually just gingerbread.  Instead of cutting them into nice and friendly shapes, they are made into bats, skulls, pumpkins and bones.  Actually, they're enormous and pretty much a meal in themselves.

Symbolism is also important in any festival (major festivals like Christmas would be unrecognisable without it) and so the decision to make gingerbread skulls/bats/pumpkins/bones is a clue to some of the symbols of that season.  

Skulls is understandable enough - pumpkins (or turnips in some areas) are supposed to resemble skulls and, in a festival remembering the dead, it's hardly surprisingly to find an image that reminds us all of our own mortality.  Bearing this in mind, bones and pumpkins are also almost predictable as symbols of Halloween.

But bats?  I've never really questioned it before, but what exactly do bats have to do with Halloween?  I'll hazard a guess that it's because they're creatures of darkness.  Back when Halloween was Samhain, before the advent of Christianity, the festival was designed to mark the beginning of winter.  The daylight was swiftly being consumed by a long darkness and so creatures that appreciate the dark - like bats - were suddenly much more visible.

This, in turn, led to bat being associated with witchcraft - they fly quickly and silently and, in the right light, can seem to flicker between visibility and invisibility.  

In the questionnaire I have produced, I've asked people if they think that a bat is a symbol of Halloween so, given the above thoughts, it will be interesting to see how that question is answered.

Here's a photo I took at the National Museum of Scotland.  I discovered the Dia de los Muertos display and found this guy really interesting.  I know that my dissertation is about Halloween in Caithness (and not Mexico!) but, for me, something about this defines the cultural aspect of the Halloween-style festivals.

So... welcome to my Halloween in Caithness blog.

First, a little bit of background.  I'm a BA (Hons) Scottish Cultural Studies student at the University of the Highlands and Islands and, for my fourth year dissertation, I have opted to write a paper on how Halloween is marked in Caithness.

This means looking at Halloween festivities from around the world, around the country and around the local area.  I'm a big Halloween fan myself, hence choosing the topic, but I know that it elicits a strong reaction from some people.  

Way back in the distant past, before I took a year's sabbatical from studying, I remember taking a module called Visual Sociology.  I don't think it's still called that, but I'm guessing the premise is just about the same.  One thing that we had to do for that was to create a project and we were encouraged to do it blog-style.  With the experience from that module in mind, here I am creating a blog for my dissertation.

I will attempt to update the blog at least once a week with interesting, relevant things!  Here goes...