Stop pretending Halloween is a thing in Europe
Stop pretending Halloween is a thing in Europe
Tired of all this pumpkin and plastic skeleton crap everywhere. Thanks, marketing ghouls 
What, are we going to start celebrating the 4th of July next? Might as well with the NATO membership I guess
I'm not sure how to break this to you, but Halloween is European. Halloween was invented in Ireland, from the pagan celebration of Samhain. Even the practice of dressing up in costume and going from door to door asking for food is recorded as of the 16th century at the latest. Pranks, as well as "Mischief Night," also dates from the 18th century at the latest. This is all pre-Americanisation. It's not a continental European tradition but it's certainly European, not American.
Halloween is fun shut up
When the communist revolution happens not only will Halloween remain as an informal Holiday: All saint day will become an official federal holiday to ensure there is no work or school the day after!
Halloween? At least it got some social meaning behind it.
Wait until you realize how many countries specialy in the global south have "Black Friday" discounts now. I don't think there is anything quite as pathetic other than being a literal gusano.
Anyway one of the best examples of cultural imperialism by capitalism, shoving some meaningless sign in the language of the imperial core to signify a holiday that these people don't even celebrate.
I don't know if there is a better source somewhere or if it was discussed before, but anyway its quite obvious even on the wiki entry just look at the around the world section and you'll notice it literaly became a thing "overnight", since 2010s with the growth of online retail around the world.
Actualy thinking about it now its quite scary to think, western capitalism was extremely effective here.
Halloween comes free with your subscription to movie & tv monoculture having happened.
Sorry, boomers existed and they made capitalism mandatory, and now we're stuck with the consequences forever.
The calvinist countries went too far in abolishing its traditional holidays and now they have to import foreign ones to mend its ecosystem.
I don't think that anyone in their right mind would say that we are suffering from an overabundance of joy in the world.
Nobody is forcing you to celebrate Halloween but it's okay to abide people having harmless fun. Life is short and far too often it's filled with misery and suffering and there's no need to add to your own misery unnecessarily, especially when it's because other people are celebrating.
At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love [for the people]. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
— Che Guevara
So in the 1990s my mom left the occupied Dakota land where she was born, to live in Norway, the country of birth of her grand-to-great-great-grandparents. This means that I was raised bilingual in English and Norwegian, with two passports. By extent I have a fairly complicated relationship to nationality, and in particular to "American-ness".
And one example of this complicated relationship is with Halloween. Because I would've been born right around the time when Halloween was first starting to gain a foothold in Norway, right? So I got to basically witness firsthand, what was initially a tradition specific only to my and a few other US emigrants' families, meant to remind us of our family back in the occupation zones and basically just celebrate being born abroad... Become something celebrated nationally by children with no real familial connection to the holiday. Halloween went from something that I could share with people — something that I could invite my friends to celebrate as a unique experience — to something ubiquitous across basically the entire country.
On the one hand, I was glad that I could with time get more booty from trick-or-treating; my mom was glad that it was easier and easier to get decorations and pumpkins to carve... But on the other hand, I also kinda resented the popularization of Halloween in Norway. I resented how, as you say, marketing ghouls as well as media imported from America had managed to essentially airdrop an entire holiday into a new country. Norwegians even refer to the holiday by its English name, "Halloween" — so Halloween definitely has the vibe of something transplanted here for marketing purposes.
I mean, it's not the worst, because Halloween is a fun holiday. I understand why people want to celebrate it even without any real personal connection to it, and it's perfectly fine to do so; and Halloween also feels like a distinctly children-to-young-adult-oriented holiday, which means that celebrating it can still be a way for me to connect to youth culture, right?
But nevertheless, I guess my point with this is that even from a pretty young age, I had already grown to despise American cultural hegemony specifically because I was an American in Norway. I saw American cultural hegemony as simultaneously cheapening my own family's ways of celebrating our origins and relatives; as well as actively harming the culture of the country where we lived, all for the sake of profit. So I basically wanted Americans in Norway to be just another immigrant group, in the same way as Eritreans or Pakistanis or Lithuanians or Peruvians. The English language, as I saw it, should've been equal in status to Urdu and Polish; American media should've been equal in status to Russian and Chinese; American culture all the same. I'd say this is what sets me apart from a large portion of the anti-Halloween crowd in Norway, which in my experience is dominated by old, racist curmudgeons who don't want any sort of cultural exchange, whereas I have just always dreamed of cultural exchange without hierarchy.
...But at the same time, is my dream of American culture being equal to the cultures of other countries really possible, when American culture is itself a bit of an unnatural, new thing? Like, Halloween as I know it is only as old as my grandparents. It originated as essentially a marketing-bastardized appropriation of an Irish holiday. So mainstream (read: white) American culture is really just a series of appropriations put in a blender, flattening the actual diversity of the different immigrant communities in the United Occupation Zones — because this flattening of diversity is necessary for establishing and upholding the racist hierarchy that the entire nation is built on.
So... I guess that makes my feelings towards Halloween kinda hypocritical? Like, what is playing out in Norway right now is what already played out in North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Irish immigrants probably felt similarly about Samhain getting turned into mass-produced costumes, as I feel about the plastic tchotchkes flooding Norway's shopping centers today. I'm acting possessive over something that was never mine to begin with.
So what I do to commemorate my relatives living on occupied Dakota land kinda validates that selfsame occupation. It's fundamentally different from, like, Kurds celebrating Nowruz and stuff, and so it can't really be treated the same, can it? What my family does to celebrate our "heritage abroad" is really just commemorating, like, four generations of children who were born on stolen land, before one of them returned to where she really had her roots. So Halloween is really just... a souvenir of our family's brief time in North America. It isn't some sort of honorable tradition we've had for many generations.
Why is it so hard for me to just accept that? And why do I still feel some sense of pride from flying the Stars & Stripes, while I simultaneously never hesitate to say "Death to Amerikkka!"? Why do I find so much beauty in speaking and writing the language that was forced on my great-grandparents, while simultaneously decrying that language being similarly forced on my peers in the present?
...I dunno, isolation, propaganda, and privileged laziness, I guess.
Sorry for the ramble, sorry if this doesn't really make much sense, this is just stuff I've been chewing on for a while.
Get in the mech costume, Sweden
This is All Saint's Eve erasure
This reminds me of and American friend who was in the UK for a few years and during his first Bonfire Night, some kids knocked on his door and said "Penny for the guy?" And he said "no" and just shut the door lmao
I like Halloween, but I dislike how it's basically replaced Nos Calan Gaeaf as a holiday.
Less mask and sweets, more hurrying home at the stroke of midnight before the last ember in the bonfire dies lest the white lady drags you to the afterlife.
Not even to speak ofblack Friday, it makes my blood fucking boil
but it's fun >:(
Broke: dressing up fancy for Halloween
Woke: Dressing up fancy all the time
Bespoke: Dressing up all the time in costumes you made yourself.
That said Allhallowtide has always been celebrated in Catholic countries, and Shakespeare mentions soul cakes in his plays. Obviously it's also a co-option of a standard Equinox Festival.
In America Halloween is a communal holiday that all people takes party in. In Europe Halloween is literally just marketing ghouls pushing shitty plastic decorations and overpriced candy on children. It is even displacing similar indigenous traditions that doesn't get amplified through the American cultural slop we consume thanks to Yankee cultural hegemony.
Its Reformationday
You Ungodly heatheans !
its for thinking about bad Martin Luther. ( sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der Heiligen Schrift die erbärmliche Christenheit also ganz jämmerlichen besudelt hat.)
You're loss. It's fun
Halloween is a reddit holiday
Permanently Deleted
The irony is Capitalism is killing Halloween in America. Corpo media has everyone so afraid of their neighbors that trick or treating is dying. Most adults don't bother doing anything because it's all so expensive and even if they stay home there are no trick or treaters anymore. Combine that with the creeping horror that is the Christmas season, with stores starting to stock their plastic Christmas crap in fucking August, and an concentrated effort to kill the holiday by American evengelicals. Halloween just isn't what it used to be.
October was literally the best time of life for me as a kid. Carving jack o lanterns to bond with my dad, going on my town's haunted hayride and being a little less scared of the haunted house every year, scaring each other in front of bonfires, watching your favorite cartoons' spooky special, dressing up and feeling cool and adventurous with your friends while you get a ton of free candy, etc. etc.
Now it's more a time to watch horror movies, look at the decorations everywhere, and dress up and feel cool with your friends while you get a bunch of free alcohol. Top tier holiday, you just gotta understand the vibes and nostalgia and sense of community. Also rewatching Over the Garden Wall this week