Yes. I’m a goth sideshow performer, it lasts the whole month of October and leeches into September and November for me. October is my busiest month of the year, and I love it.
On a personal level, Halloween is the only holiday I actually enjoy. I’m a grump around every other holiday, ESPECIALLY Christmas
What does that entail? You go up on stage and act all depressed?
It’s absolutely not a thing here, no matter how often retailers have tried to make it one.
I find a camping site next to a lake and hope a group of 18-25 year olds will camp…
I enjoy the opportunity to do a little spooky stuff. We live near a primary school and there are lots of young families around so there’s always trick or treaters. We generally carve pumpkins and have a few decorations and sweets for them.
I tend to run a horror themed table top RPG for friends around the time as well which is usually good fun. I’m going to do Dread this year where you pull blocks from a Jenga tower instead of rolling dice and someone’s character dies if they knock the tower over.
i was six years old when the first halloween event happened in this country. it was imported here in the nineties by a costume shop. it’s an explicitly consumerist thing here and i do not understand why anyone here cares for it.
Not really. Retailers try to make it more of a thing every year though. We have Sinterklaas, Christmas and most important the Carnaval season here in the south of the Netherlands, which starts on 11/11.
More interestingly though the same day as Carnaval season starts we have ‘Sint-Maarten’, where the kids also trick and treat. This tradition is also known as old halloween.
In some German and Dutch-speaking towns, there are nighttime processions of children carrying paper lanterns or turnip lanterns and singing songs of St Martin. These processions are known in German as Laternelaufen.
Not really, we do Día de los Muertos where I live which is the day after. Halloween is celebrated here and it’s kind of become a week long event but it’s for children.
Fun fact! Halloween and Dia de los Muertoes are on the “same” day!
Halloween is “Hallow’s Evening”. ie the Evening of All Hallow’s Day, aka All Saint’s Day, and directly related to Dia de los Muertos. But it’s the calendar day before, right? October 31st? Sort of. In Catholicism, the liturgical day begins and ends with prayers at sunset. The day had ended and a new day had begun, usually between 4pm and 6pm. So the order of the 24 hour day goes: evening, night, morning, afternoon. Therefore 6pm on the 1st of November would be too late to celebrate All Saint’s Day, so it was actually celebrated the calendar day before.
The same is true of Christmas Eve. Why do we have the “Evening” of Christmas the day before? Why do many cultures begin full celebration the night before? Precisely because as a Christian event on a Christian calendar, that is when the day actually begins.
As a former Catholic it’s important I acknowledge all of this overlays the local traditions syncretised into these far more secular ‘holidays’ today. It wouldn’t be important for Halloween to be celebrated in the “e’en” if Oiche Samhain wasn’t a night time thing.
Local theatre company usually puts on a fundraiser party that’s a surprising amount of fun. I like to put together a homemade costume the best I can and get juuuuust drunk enough to embarrass myself on the dance floor.
Unfortunately it’s canceled this year due to the usual party-thrower quitting the board of directors 😭 I’m a little short on time and money so it’s probably a blessing in disguise, but I’m already daydreaming about next Halloween. I’m thinking giant foam SpongeBob head 🤔
In Italy it wasn’t a thing at all when I was a kid, younger generations go at it more but it’s just an excuse to party dressing differently than usual. If you don’t like to party you basically don’t even know it happened.