Where I don't really understand Halloween

[alexandral]

I didn't want to spoil anyone's fun yesterday with grumpy entries, but I do not understand Halloween. Mostly likely because I grew up in USSR where we never had this holiday. It fact, round about this time of year USSR used to have one of their biggest holidays of the year, "The October revolution day", celebrating the anniversary of the revolution in 1917. This was one of the biggest holidays, but not one of the favourite ones. Usually the fun consisted of big parades and demonstrations (in mostly freezing weather you get in Russia at this season) and lots of Lenin films shown on TV. The favourite time of the year it was not, at least not mine.
Tangentially, when the similarity between the date of "The October revolution day" and "All Hallows' Eve" was discovered in 90s, this produced much speculation and conspiracy theories about the "demonic" nature of the October Revolution of 1917. Seriously. :D

The other aspect of Halloween-underappreciation for me is the fact that I don't see why my kid or I should get dressed as a skeleton or a zombie or any other evil thing. I am quite literal and for me evil things are .. well.. evil. As I understand, in the USA people get dressed in all manner of fun costumes and this sounds like something that can potentially be fun. But here in the UK the costumes we get seem to be witch/ghoul/zombie/pumpkin. I have no desire to dress as any of those.

Also I don't think it is at all that safe for kids to be wondering dark streets alone, demanding sweets from strangers. Usually the little ones are accompanied by an adult, but I have seen several groups of 9-10-11-12 year olds wondering the streets unattended. Yes, I am paranoid, but I still don't think this is safe at all.

And the last thing, although may be this is the main thing, is that I do not like ANY of commercial holidays. I have a sneaky suspicion that they all are invented by "evil multinational corporations" that want to sell more of cheap sweets, cheap zombie masks and other stuff that we don't really need.

Just for fun: the old card with the battleship Aurora literally translates: "Glory to the Great October!"

Comments

[embossedsilver.livejournal.com]

It's totally an American thing, and something that's really rooted in childhood. Getting dressed up, getting candy, spooky things...As an adult, most of the pleasure comes from being creative and getting to be silly.

I don't really think Americans have embraced the costume party as a whole, so this is our one outlet for that. I've never seen a non-Halloween costume/fancy dress party.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the way Halloween sounds in the USA, but here it is not at all like that. If I had a chance to dress my daughter as Gwen from Merlin? may be thought more about it. But as a zombie? Definitely no.

I think the holiday just hasn't "grown into" the UK culture yet. Also we have Guy Fawkes night really really close to halloween.

[embossedsilver.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was never really clear on how it was celebrated in other countries, or if it was celebrated at all.

I will say that the development of taking really young kids (younger than six or so) out seems to be recent. I don't remember people dressing their kids up until they were in primary school, when I was a kid.