In Melbourne, Oz, had some children in previous years, none this year. So yes maybe declining.
Guy Fawkes is pretty much dead, so its sort of surprising it hasnt replaced it - seems to be a critical mass problem. Wiki claims 4 million Oz celebrate it, but it sure doesnt seem like it.
Otara
Agree. I’m 30 years old and have lived in the UK all my life. Halloween was a big deal when I was a kid, and it’s a big deal to kids (and adults) now.
What has changed is that kids don’t go door to door unaccompanied so much these days, although I suspect they do in small rural communities.
In my part of Scotland (Aberdeenshire), we carved heads out of turnips (colloquially “neeps”), not pumpkins (turnips were much more difficult to carve), and trick or treating was called “guising”. Both customs are, I believe, losing out to the American way.
And yes, bonfire night was also a big deal. It was a good week to be a kid.
I can confirm that Germany has embraced Halloween more and more over time. Every year, we have more kids at our door. This year, I was amused that most of the kids had memorized a song or little poem that they recited in unison before digging into the bowl of candy I had. The stores have more Halloween-related merchandise every year, too, although I was dismayed not to find the little chocolate pumpkins with orange filling from Milka this time around. Bastards.
“Agree. I’m 30 years old and have lived in the UK all my life. Halloween was a big deal when I was a kid, and it’s a big deal to kids (and adults) now.”
I was in the UK (London) in the 70’s and it was a non-event at the school I went to. I think it varies quite a bit inside the UK, and wasnt a particularly big thing in England, but to have come back since - Wiki talks about trick or treating coming there in the 80’s and it being lamented as a US influence etc etc.
It was a church supported school though, so maybe they deliberately didnt celebrate it.
Otara
Yes, Halloween has become more popular. This is probably helped by the fact that customs similar to trick-or-treating already have traditionally been associated with other holidays in Germany (e.g. Rummelpott in North Germany on New Year’s Eve). So the song/poem thing that shantih mentions is probably a product of a fusion of German/American customs
That’s interesting - the aforementioned guising in Scotland also requires that the kids sing a song or do an act rather than just dress up and say trick or treat.
I haven’t heard of kids doing a song or act as a Halloween tradition, although when I was a kid there were some adults who insisted that ‘trick or treat’ meant that the kids have to do a ‘trick’ in order to get a treat.
It’s becoming (Become?) quite popular in my part of Australia as an excuse for teenagers and twentysomethings to have themed dress-up parties, but there haven’t been as many actual kids trick or treating, which is fine by me since I object to the practice anyway.
The supermarkets here had, for the first time I can recall, massive pumpkins for carving Jack-O-Lanterns (a bargain at $20 each, no less!), huge amounts of halloween “theming”, and a couple of radio and TV stations had either “spooky” theming or programming.
In fact, it all made me rather irritated this year- I’m not a huge Halloween fan at the best of times and I resent it being imported out of whole cloth and everyone just being expected to think it’s the most awesome thing ever and totally get into it.
Hallowe’en has always been popular here in Ireland, with trick-or-treating plus bonfires, fireworks etc. I think perhaps in recent years it has become more Americanised, with pumpkins becoming popular (we used to carve turnips). Years ago kids used to ask for “Help with the Hallowe’en Party” but that term seems to have died out in favour of “trick or treat”.
Halloween doesn’t exist in China. People know of it, of course, and they know a bit about the celebration of it, but no one I know has ever celebrated it. It hasn’t caught on among fashionable, trendy young people in the way Christmas or Valentine’s Day has.
I’m kind of surprised, actually. I lived in China and noticed it was not a big thing. I expected it to catch on eventually as:
It’s quite marketable and sells a lot of crap.
It’s cute when kids are in costumes.
It’s fun and entertaining.
It’s definitely become more popular here, though not with children - it’s more of an adult holiday. Though it’s mostly foreigners participating. And slutty Korean girls dressed up as police/nurses/pirates/whathaveyou.
No kids came to my door in Auckland, but my wife did take our son and a couple of his friends to a costumed Halloween… sorry “Light” party locally. (Put on in a nearby park by a local church group – they get a :rolleyes: for the name, but they’re actually not obnoxiously preachy otherwise).
9 year old son was adamant about what costume he had to have this year: Doctor Who. 
(11th Doctor to be precise – we’re doing our part in proudly raising the next generation of geeks…)
This Post Is Worthless Without Pictures.
I can understand why it’s not popular among children and their parents. The idea of dressing your kid up in a costume and going to the neighbor’s apartment and begging for candy seems like it would be totally horrifying to your average face-conscious Chinese person.
However, I guess there are some 20-and-up Chinese folks, usually college students or college educated, who can speak English and who know something of Western culture and conventions that participate in Halloween parties thrown by ex-pats. It’s similar to what HazelNutCoffee mentioned above. In fact, last night one of the students at the college where I teach (a pretty Westernized kind of Chinese guy who speaks decent English and has quite a few foreign friends) asked me if I was planning to go to so-and-so’s party at such-and-such bar. I said I was too old for that kind of thing.
I know about turnips being used for jack-o’-lanterns before pumpkins were brought over from North America. They must be really difficult to carve. Also, I’m thinking the turnips in Ireland must be a lot bigger than the ones we see in the stores in the US. They’re so small you couldn’t even put a birthday candle in them.
I notice some of the shops have a lot of halloween themed junk in this year, but haven’t heard of anyone celebrating it. Living in the middle of town for seven years, I think we only ever had one group of trick or treaters come by - maybe three kids. We didn’t have anything for them because we never get trick or treaters, and also because I don’t want to encourage the practice. In this day and age, it seems wrong to send your kids around asking for candy from the neighbours who you probably don’t even know anyway. I’d certainly never laid eyes on those three kids before.
Many Japanese live in the area where I came from in Hong Kong. It always seems to be a big deal for them, and you can see a lot of their kids out and about in costume. The locals don’t really celebrate it though. I don’t know if anything has changed recently.
I have a friend who’s 24 and from Melbourne. She just moved to the States and has been raving about her “first Halloween” all week. It’s pretty cute
I don’t know if she lives in a different part of Melbourne from Otara (maybe a city vs. outskirts thing) or if she was just too old to go ToT once it caught on there.
At the college I teach at in China, they’ve had pumpkin carving the past 3 years, but that is about it. Of course the pumpkins they buy are twice the size of a softball, so they’re not the best Jack-O’-Lanterns. But they try.
As an ex-pat with a 3-year old son, we organized some trick-or-treating with some other foreign teachers and their kids. We hit a grand total of 5 homes of other teachers (none Chinese).
However, my wife just informed me there is some type of Halloween party tonight (Nov. 1) supposedly with my son’s Chinese kindergarten. She didn’t have all the details yet, but I guess it shows there’s a growing knowledge of Halloween amongst the youngsters.