By Hayley Conole
As an Australian exchange student, I am excited and bewildered by my first brush with Halloween. Although the heavy influence of North American pop culture has given me a taste of Halloween festivities, especially trick-or-treating, costumes, parties and mayhem, I have never actually experienced it for myself. There are no jack-o-lanterns Down Under.
For example, when I was eight years old my sister and I decided to try trick-or-treating, imitating what we had seen on television. We went to the neighbours’ houses; I was dressed in my finest old sheet; my sister, a stunning garbage bag.
No one opened their doors! Our bounty for the night consisted of an apple and a chocolate bar from our next-door neighbour, whose daughter had joined us on our futile expedition.
Since then, a few questions have haunted me: What is Halloween all about and why is it so popular in North America? Why isn’t it celebrated in the same way by other countries? Now that I am surrounded by shop fronts and houses covered in ghouls, skeletons and pumpkins, I have decided to investigate.
Halloween has its origin in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, traditionally celebrated on Oct. 31, the night before the Celtic New Year Nov. 1.
The Celts believed the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred and that on this night the spirits returned to earth to choose the body of a person or animal they would possess for the next year.
The Celts dressed themselves as demons, witches and other undesirable creatures to frighten away the roving spirits.
By the ninth century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands and November 1 became All Saints’ Day, a time to honour saints and martyrs. The celebration was called All-Hallowmas with the night before it, All-Hallows Eve, eventually becoming Halloween.
A walk through the Rideau Centre clearly shows the transformation of this celebration. The costumes, while still including the traditional witch, monster and ghost outfits, have been stretched to include everything from Disney characters to villains and heroes from popular movies.
These images in popular culture helped to spread Halloween across the globe, albeit with mixed reception. After all, this is how I grew to know Halloween in Australia. What about other countries?
In the United Kingdom, the ancient home of the Celts, Halloween is still not as big as it is in North America today. For the most part, Halloween ceased to be widely celebrated there after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.
Since followers of the new religious movement did not believe in saints, there was no reason to celebrate the eve of All Saints Day.
However, the celebration has filtered back into Britain.
Frances Sutherland comes from Aberdeen, Scotland. She says she has always celebrated Halloween, but not to the extreme of the North Americans.
“In Canada, they dress up as anything and it’s more of a family thing, where people decorate their houses. We don’t do that. In Scotland it has more to do with friends, dressing up as something scary and going trick-or-treating if you’re little or to a party if you’re older.”
In other cultures that share the northern climate, but not the Celtic tradition, Halloween is a relatively new phenomenon.
In many places it is celebrated only because of the influence of Hollywood movies.
Enrico Mangiagalli, from Milan, is currently studying in Ottawa. He says he barely knew of Halloween as a young boy, but it has recently become more popular in Italy.
“If you go to the pubs or bars they have Halloween parties. It’s something we do to have fun with friends, but it’s not part of our tradition. It’s something we saw in the movies and it has caught on.”
Jannis Rake says the Halloween experience is much the same in his hometown of Berlin, Germany.
“We know the concept of Halloween, but we don’t go trick or treating or anything. Because people have always known of the concept, there are parties with that theme, where everyone gets dressed up. But recently it’s just been a push by the media and a way for businesses to make more money.”
The lack of Halloween festivities in Australia has a lot to do with the different climate. Pumpkins don’t grow there in October and the end of our harvest is in April, so the only thing we celebrate is the end of winter.
Regardless of what is done at home, this year, I will dress up, go trick-or-treating and give the eight-year-old inside me a proper Halloween. Hopefully, this time my bounty will be more than just an apple.