I was reading this story, which discusses how the American holiday of Halloween is invading Europe, and it surprised me. I didn’t realize this was happening.
EuroDopers, are you really getting trick-or-treaters? I’m thinking if I lived in somewhere in Europe, I’d like to go trick-or-treating in Belgium. Think of the good chocolate they must pass out in Brussels. Or in Monthelimar for the nougat.
What’s the story in your country?
There’s a small amount of trick-or-treating. Nothing like the American stuff. It’s an excuse for slightly-ironic parties among older kids & students. It’s an excuse for teenagers to go around causing havoc. Nothing else, really.
Back when I was a kid, there was a big USAF presence on airbases near here…getting invited to Halloween there was a real treat.
One particular point - when people do actually do Halloween fancy dress, they make it, errrr, Halloween-related. The American thing of just dressing up as anything doesn’t make sense.
I suspect you’d be disappointed. If it’s anything like here, the good folks of Belgium will be handing out the same kind of cheap and nasty mass-produced Halloween-themed sweets as you get in the US.
Which I suppose is the point of the complaint: not that the customs are foreign, and therefore unwelcome, but that people are losing touch with their own native traditions under a deluge of tatty, lowest-common-denominator trash. Not that the kids are complaining – kids love trash.
I can’t honestly say it’s made a huge difference here in North East England. We have our own traditions of children annoying the neighbours by going around begging on Halloween (and Bonfire Night, and Christmas). Calling it “trick or treating” is new, but apart from that…
Oh, yeah — pumpkins. Suddenly it’s all about pumpkins. When I was a kid, we made our lanterns from turnips (or swedes, if you insist I call them that). Now the shops are flooded with pumpkins from the beginning of October, and I’m damn sure nobody I know eats the buggers. And you can’t get a turnip you can make a proper lantern from, either — they’ve all been topped and tailed before they get to the shop.
Oh, another point specific to Britain is the proximity of Halloween to Guy Fawkes Day (Nov 5th). We’ve always had an excuse for a bit of fun in the miserable early-winter, so Halloween is not really necessary for that purpose. If anything, the two are perhaps gradually merging.
No. Here it is mostly a theme for parties, whether private or commercial. Of course people have a general idea what it is through the media, but it isn’t really a holiday.
[Baldrick] Someday, I’ll have a turnip o’lantern of my very own. [/Baldrick]
Except for sometimes roasting and eating the seeds, no one eats lantern pumpkins here, either. I think a lantern made from a turnip would be cool. At least one could cook up the insides of the turnip in a soup or something. Do you put a scary face on them like we do our pumpkins?
Actually, it isn’t a “holiday” in the USA either. Just another workday, but some businesses might let employees with little kids go home a little early to help them get ready for their trick or treating.
I live in Las Vegas now, but when I was living in Berlin many years ago, hardly anybody had ever heard of Halloween, other than through the Peanuts cartoons and the Halloween scary film series. Now my friends in Germany are telling me it is quite popular to have Halloween parties in large businesses (KaDeWe for instance) and at home. I have also heard a lot of the bars and nightclubs are having events over the weekend. I don’t think the door-to-door trick or treating has caught on though.
… or a warming, nourishing stew … or a casserole … or mashed with butter … mmmm.
Yeah, we’d cut faces into them. Get a nice swede as big as your head, cut the top off, hollow it out, cut a face in the front, put the candle in, make a couple of little holes either side of the big one on top to thread a string through so you can carry it round the streets. It’s not such a bonny colour as a pumpkin, I’ll give you that, but it’s more convenient for carrying around.
You asked about Europe, but I’ll jump in.
People in Japan are aware of it, but trick-or-treating hasn’t caught on yet. A number of bars have costume parties, some kindergartens have little costume-and-candy parties, and there’s a kinda-sorta tradition among some of the foreigners in Tokyo to dress up in costume and ride a few laps around the city on the Yamanote Line (the reaction of most of the commuters seems to be “Huh? Oh, yeah, that thing…”).
I think the surest sign that it’s here but still has a long way to go: the convenience store near my office has a Halloween display consisting of two feet of shelf space, one cut-out jack-o-lantern, and three bags of mini-chocolates.
You kidding me? Pumpkin pie, soup, casserole, roasted pumpkin, you name it. Pumpkin rocks.
When I grew up, here in Oz, Halloween was just something we knew about from numerous American sitcoms. Then suddenly about, oh 15 years ago or so, the streets were full of kids asking for “candy”. I guess the accumulated cultural pressure on the young just became too much to bear.
And pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin cookies!
People cook the *hell *out of pumpkins here, teela. Mmmmm. Pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin does rock.
I would love if kids were going trick-or-treating way up here on the Central Coast. This is the first year my son is old enough to go and it’s really making me homesick that I can’t get him dressed up and go door-to-door with him (well, I could, but they’d all think I was nuts). In our grocery store, there were three “Halloween Pumpkins” for sale and the local video store is having an “October Sale” complete with bat decorations. That’s about the extent of the Halloween festivities I’ve seen.
In an effort to assuage my homesickness, my friends are bringing their kids over for a little costume party, I’m going to buy one of those pumpkins and roast the seeds, and we’re going to have a little candy hunt at my house.
Oh, and, I don’t think the pumpkins you carve are really the best ones to make all those pumpkin-y goodies (except for roast seeds). In fact, the bright orange ones in our grocery store are marked “not for consumption.” The ones that actually take like the pumpkin that comes in those Libby brand cans are green and kind of little.
Where in Sydney do you live? I haven’t seen any great surge of children asking for sweets.
I shall be treating any young visitors to our house in this way.
OK, probably not. I have a sense of complete meh towards hallowe’en - I can’t get excited enough about it to do anything (beyond perhaps carving a pumpkin with the kids - although swedes were what we used when I w’r a lad), I can’t get motivated enough to despise it (even though the churches with which I’m involved would like me to).
Actually, the Christian reaction to it has been quite amusing; most churches, if they say anything at all about Hallowe’en, voice the general position that it’s really, really bad/evil/satanic, but the odd thing is that they’re so damn quietly polite about it - They don’t want your kids to fall prey to satan, but they also don’t want to spoil the fun or be seen as spoilsports.
4 years ago, I was living in a town outside London, with a bunch of Dutch chaps. None of us were even aware it was Halloween until the little kids started showing up at our door. We had enough candy to go around for maybe the first 4 groups of kids, after which we started handing out bags of potato chips! Once we ran out, we just turned off our lights and ignored the knocks on the door… the next morning, we found rolls of toilet paper all over the front lawn.
The Dutch guys didn’t seem to be aware of it,so I assume Halloween hadn’t yet invaded Holland.
Could someone explain the toilet paper, please?
I was in a pub on Tuesday night (25th) in Farringdon, London. At about half nine, three young chisellers, the youngest being no more than 8 or 9, came in wearing werewolf masks and the like and carrying little yellow plastic buckets and proceeded to beg for money for Hallowe’en from everyone in the pub. Needless to say, I told them to eff off when they came to me.
There are so many things wrong with that that I do not know where to begin. Legally, nobody under the age of 14 is allowed into a pub, and only then when accompanied by an adult. Allowing children to be out alone at that time of night is an appalling lapse by their parents. It wasn’t even close to the 31st of October; if these brats visited 5 pubs a night for a week and got about £5 in total from each pub, that’s an awful lot of money for them to spend on heroin or crack or alcopops or whethever it is children take for pleasure nowadays.
Grrrrrrrrr!!
This statement, as it stands, is rather sweeping and somewhat inaccurate - clarification may be found here
When I was a kid in England in the 60s and early 70s, there was nothing for Halloween. The day before Guy Fawke’s Day was called Mickey Night (meaning Mischief Night), where kids did just the “trick” part - knocking on doors and running away etc.
Hijacking a bit, in America does anyone ever do the “trick” part of “trick or treat”? When kids come to my door saying “trick or treat” I have occasionally said “trick” and they look lost - so I change my mind and give them candy.
This is hilarious and gruesome to me. Where I live, swede always means ‘person from Sweden’. I’ve never heard it mean anything else, least of all rutabaga.
Your posts have cracked me up and I think attention should be drawn as to why: There could be other Americans wandering through this thread, wondering why WotNot is massacring and mutilating tiny Swedish people.
