I’m a European mongrel, can I chime in? In NZ, or at least where I’ve lived, Halloween is normally trumped by Guy Fawkes, the week after, especially if the fifth falls on a Friday or Saturday (which it does this year, sweet!) The last couple of years it’s passed me by without a single knock on the door, although when we lived on a street with a lot of little kids (and a fairly active parents’ network) we had a couple of hours of teenyweeny Harry Potters asking for Fruit Bursts.
Trick-or-Treating must be fairly tricky for parents to organise, I think, especially if it’s on a school night, as it doesn’t get dark 'til half seven, and all the Halloween research I’ve ever done (that is, I’ve seen ET a fair few times) suggests that trick-or-treating is best left 'til after dark, long after little ghosties should be in bed.
the 31st is a Monday night, and we live in an area that’s fairly light on children, so I’m not expecting much. Guy Fawkes, on the other hand, is on a Friday night, two days before I turn twenty-two, three days before one of my best friends heads off on her OE and two days after a friend gets back from teaching in New Cal. All that PLUS gunpowder! Woohoo!
Perhaps the small pumpkin lanterns are really what we call gourds?
There are small pumpkins, sometimes called pie pumpkins (self explanatory name), but there are also smaller ones that are NOT for eating/cooking.
I learned waaaay back that lanterns were made from rutubagas. I always wanted to see a rutubaga (wasn’t there some very old children’s story about rutabagas? I love saying that word). Never did, though. Here it’s just pumpkins (near Chicago).
I feel weird about one of our traditions going in reverse, so to speak. Says alot about the transmisson of culture, I suppose. In UK, at least, it should be a re-discovering of an old tradition, but France? NZ? Germany?
Have at it, folks! <—closest thing to jack o’ lantern face
Oddly enough, nearly all of the ‘ornamental gourds’ like these that you see for sale either as seeds or as mature fruit are in fact quite edible, being again, just varieties or hybrids of cucurbita spp. pepo and maxima - about the worst you could expect from these is that they may not be particularly fleshy inside, or they might be difficult to peel and (very rarely) they might have a bitter flavour.
That’s what I wonder every time Halloween is deemed an “American Holiday.” We didn’t create the holiday, after all! Kids went around begging for food on Halloween night long before there even was a US.
And beer! Don’t forget pumpkin beer! I’m bottling mine tonight. I used a small carving pumpkin, just because I was too impatient and lazy to look for the kind that are grown for eating.
[/hijack]
I’m now remembering a little story in one of Peter Mayle’s books about his village’s retired schoolteacher kvetching about the invasion of " 'Allowine" and the tragic appearance of “potirons mutilees”. It took PM awhile to figure out what the guy was talking about. The schoolteacher was not happy about the sullying of French culture with this import from America.
It is still strongly resisted in Australia. Our attitudes towards American culture are not very consistent here. If it’s something that’s just there for the taking, like rap music and hip hop culture, then people will embrace it. If it’s an event like Halloween, that needs business to get behind it (as it would starting from scratch), then it’s not going to happen.
Over the last ten years or so, there have been attempts at introducing Halloween. There’s been a bit of marketing of spooky products and sweets, but the take-up is confined to usually a few streets here and there in white, middle-class SUV cul-de-sac suburbs, where the parents often get together to organise it, and there may even be a bit of a street party - so kids can trick or treat in a controlled environment.
For the rest of we great unwashed in the sprawling multicultural suburbia of places like Sydney or Melbourne, then we know what it is, we’ve nothing against it, but not for us, thanks.
In Finland, Halloween mostly manifests itself by gift shops etc. putting out some kind of spider-pumpkin-ghost-themed display. Companies sometimes arrange Halloween parties (my parents went to one yesterday), but it’s still not too common. We arranged a Halloween party for our girl scouts a few years ago, but that was just because I thought it would be fun to have a theme party where everyone could dress up, and I had all this Halloween crap at home that we had bought while in the States.
Trick-or-treating hasn’t really caught on, though. The thing is, we already have a sort of trick-or-treat thing before Easter. It’s called “virpominen” and it has its roots in the Russian Orthodox tradition in Karelia. Kids will go and collect pussywillow branches with the fluffy flowers just emerging, and will decorate them with colored paper, string, shiny things or whatever. Then they go around people’s houses and say a little rhyme while waving these decorated branches. The rhyme basically says “I’m waving this branch around and blessing you with good luck and health for the coming year.” Then they ask for a small reward in return for the branch. The kids get candy or possibly a small amount of money, and the people get a nice decoration that they can put in a vase and have on the coffee table for a while. I like it more than trick-or-treating because it involves an exchange, rather than just “give me candy or I’ll throw crap all over your lawn.”
The kids are often dressed up as old women (or, more accurately, as rural farmers’ wives used to dress like), with shawls, head scarves and long dresses. This has its roots in another Easter tradition which originated in Western Finland, but which got combined with the “virpominen” tradition after WWII, when the Karelian refugees were relocated in other parts of Finland. (Note that the following is just something I learned at about age 10 from children’s books, so it might not be completely accurate.) There is a tradition pertaining to a certain type of witch known as a “trulli”. They are often depicted as old women, but sometimes young as well. A trulli might be jealous of the good luck being enjoyed by the next farm over, so they would sneak over in the dead of night to steal some of the luck for themselves. They might snip the hairs off a prize cow’s tail to get better milking results for their own cows, or shear the softest sheep’s wool, or whatever.
When I was a youngster we’d go guising in Scotland on Halloween.
You’d have a hollowed out turnip with a candle in it and go door to door asking for “a penny for the guisers”; you’d then be invited into the house and put on a little show or tell some jokes in exchange for money (or sweets).
Then you’d go home and dook for apples (apples placed in a basin of water and you had to get one out using only your teeth), you’d also have treacle scones (or similar) hanging on bits of string and you’d have to (again) get yourself one using only your teeth.
I believe there’s a Robert Burns poem on Halloween.
Thinking of this thread I asked one of my students (a fifty-something telecoms engineer studying English) what he thought of Hallowe’en and it essentially came down to these two things.
1 - It’s ok because before, when he was a kid, they celebrated All Saints but it was a sad holiday because you visited the cemetries to pay your respects and now they have Hallowe’en it’s more fun and more for the kids.
2 - Actually his wife is from Brittany (those Celts again) and they’ve always had some sort of Hallowe’en celebration, his actual phrase was something like “still at the 19th century Bretagne was a land of how you say broulliard ? (me: fog) yes brouliiard and legendes and they have had Hallowe’en”.
A lot of European countries have 1st Nov. as a religious holiday and I guess the ‘youth’ are only too happy to have an excuse for a party the night before. Hallowe’en images fit in a way with spooky candle-light cemetries and graveyards you find in places like Poland and Estonia.
**Question **: In the US how much is Hallowe’en combining with or being influenced by the Day of the Dead as celebrated by the Mexican community ?
On the pumpkin hijack - market stalls here at this time of year offer a variety of pumpkin/gourd like vegetables. We can buy a slice of a large one or whole smaller ones. Recently I found a guy selling all manner of gourds, any shape any colour you name it - for each he had tips on the best way to cook it - fry in butter, bake, zap in the microwave and ‘eat like an avocado’ etc. A large grapefruit sized green and cream stripey one fried up nicely in butter; a melon sized orange one has done a soup and a lantern (altho’ I mucked up toasting the seeds); a slice of a water melon one did gnocchi/dumplings this evening - and I was nibling bits raw. I guess you just need to experiment - although an American colleague assured me that the best pumpkin comes in tins :dubious:
Speaking from an Irish point of view I could ask the poster…
“To what extent has Halloween invaded your country?”
My uncle who moved from Ireland to Boston in the 60’s told me that Halloween was pretty much what he remembered it to be like at home but with a few cultural changes (i.e. pumpkin instead of turnip) but became more of the commerical monster that it is today.
In Ireland Halloween has always been Halloween and hasn’t changed a lot in the past couple of thousand years IMHO though kids expecting to get money instead of candy is pretty new
One set of kids knocked at our door tonight and were happy with a handful of jelly babies. The local news last night did a special on Hallowe’en at Disneyland “despite the fact the festival isn’t as popular in recent years” and interviewed an America couple who had decorated the house and were inviting the (French) neighbours round.
No trick or treats here. However, a number of shops display halloween-themed windows, masks and similar stuff are on sale in many places, a lot of kids dress up, and so do a large number of young people. There are halloween-themed parties, etc…
It took place vey quickly. The first time I noticed people dressed up (and didn’t understand why until someone explained it to me) was in the early 90s. So, it happened in less than 15 years. However, Halloween isn’t the big deal it is in the USA. It’s not one of the major millstone of the year, adults without children normally don’t pay any attention to it (and many with children don’t,either) . But as the younger generation grows up, I assume it could eventually change, since they will have been familiar with halloween all their life.
By the way, this day used to be the day of the deceased. People would buy flowers (always the same flowers : chrysanthemiums) and visit their relatives’ graves. That’s a significant switch of traditions.
I must say I don’t like it much.
<—closest thing to jack o’ lantern face
