Why I love Halloween

I grew up in North America, where Halloween was a “tradition”. It was one of the themes at school for creative writing and art, and we all pestered our parents for pumpkins to carve into jack-o’-lanterns, and costumes to wear for parties and trick-or-treat. When I came to Europe in my teens, Halloween was non-existent.

I’ve seen how, in a generation, this alien celebration has been indoctrinated into the British psyche by supermarkets full of even more tat and trivia for parents to buy their children. No doubt this is justified by their PR departments, as a response to the “customer demand” created by US television imports.

It now has equal billing with Guy Fawkes, Easter and Christmas. How long before we can be persuaded to celebrate Thanksgiving to promote more turkey sales?

I think if Dickens were alive today, he would have reserved Scrooge’s famous catchphrase “Bah, humbug!” for Halloween.

@Bob or anyone else who finds fault with my mid-Atlantic grammar: Please be merciful of any peregrinate language that has crept into this expostulation redounding from my foreign infancy. I have strained over the annals to strangle any kindless use of English such as may abroach the adoptious bawcocks of Shakespeare’s bequest.

Pumpkins have replaced the organic vegetables on the shelves in Waitrose; I suspect an irreversible cultural shift has occurred.

If this is about getting to know your neighbours then do it during the day in the summer when I can get to know you properly. Not on a dark winters night whilst teaching your children how to harrass your neighbours/strangers for a reward. This is just more American commercialism like Christmas.

I hate it I think its a bad American culture and I always make sure I am out. I cannot believe that people see it as “fun” . I have had arguments with my own sister who takes her child out trick or treating and says that everyone in their neighbour hood has a pumpkin in the window if they wish to participate, well not round my way , they come anyway and I refuse to answer the door . There is no code and to bribe children with sweets is at worst pedophilia and at best just wrong. Whats has gone so wrong with our culture , I mean young children get sweets and unsupervised older kids are just after easy money and I feel if they are demanding money it is contortion and the government should make it a crime.For r people its can be very frightening as the gentelmen above has just demonstrated with the bleach . That is an offence. You should have called the police.!

If my door is knocked on, I only answer it if its on the 31st October, any other night they get told to come back.
On the 31st, I green up all the front windows, have a big mixing bowl full of goodies for them to grab a handful of. We do get the odd strange people calling, that I’ve never seen before but its all in good fun.
When the sprog was younger we had duck apples and pumpkin pie, halloween parties, all great fun, luckily for me, our new sprog will soon be able to enjoy it as well, its important to show her traditions that I had when I was a kid.

I can completely see why some people hate halloween – there are many things these days that are genuinely scary about it. Eric’s example is a horrible and extreme example of this. I’m completely with Hannah on this that behaviour of that sort should absolutely be reported to the police.

However, I think there are situations in which Halloween can be done as a nice celebration of community, as Hannah says. But the key thing is to make sure that people in your community are prepared. When I was very young (about 6 or 7, I think) a family of Americans moved onto our road and were determined to do Halloween properly. They knocked on the doors of the houses (around half of whom had children) and concocted a plan with homes that wanted to take part. They then arranged different things with those houses (e.g. my mum dressed up as a witch and had a cauldron full of shredded newspaper, with a ‘lucky dip’ of sweets, someone else made hot chocolate for the end of the trick or treating).

It was a really nice event – everyone who wanted to join in could, and we made sure not to knock on the houses who had asked us not to. It was a really fun evening, with about 10 houses agreeing to take part – all of them made an effort (as did we children!) and it was a lovely, fun way to meet our neighbours and celebrate a bit of a silly holiday.

I’d be all in favour of joining in if families along my street wanted to do this, and I’d happily contribute a few sweets (or perhaps some cupcakes – I love making cupcakes!) to children who came to the door. But sadly I suspect that if I do get any callers they’re far more likely to be teenagers in last-minute masks, in which case they’ll get a ‘sorry’ and a closed door from me.