4

La Toussaint, Allerhelligen
and Tutti i Santi:
The Global Celebration

Halloween has become popular throughout almost the entire English-speaking world: from Ireland, where Samhain combines with All Saints’ Day, to Great Britain and finally to North America, where the day has its most fervent fans, Halloween has spread down through two millennia. It’s also found favour in Canada, where trick or treat may have been born, and more isolated areas like the Isle of Man. The festival has received a mixed reception throughout the rest of the world, however. American expatriates around the globe have often brought Halloween with them, although in the past it was limited to little more than home parties or events at nightclubs. But over the last ten years, a combination of American media – especially seasonal films like Halloween and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Halloween-themed episodes of American television series – merchandising from large global chains like McDonald’s, and theme parks looking for revenue during the slow autumn season have created a new wave of global interest in Halloween. Halloween’s appeal for children, especially costuming and trick or treat, have made the holiday far more commercially successful than other festivals (such as Valentine’s Day) that are focused more on adults. As one folklorist has noted, ‘Halloween builds on an unbeatable combination of terror, children and sweets, and comes slap bang in the middle of an otherwise boring and ever darkening autumnal season.’1

In most of Continental Europe, the American Halloween is just starting to gain in popularity – or has already peaked and is now waning again – but there is already a longstanding tradition of celebrating 1 November with visits to graveyards in observance of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. In areas where the Catholic religion remains predominant, 1 November may also involve church attendance (All Saints’ is a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, and up until 1955 was celebrated with an octave, or eight-day-long period of prayer following the actual day) and hearing of special masses commemorating the dead. In contrast to Ireland’s pranking, Scotland’s fortune-telling and America’s treat-begging, the end of October and beginning of November in Europe was, until the recent introduction of Halloween, a quiet time with an emphasis on remembering deceased loved ones. Interestingly, in many areas of Europe, Halloween seems to be regarded as completely distinct from All Saints’ Day, even unrelated.

Four West Yorkshire revellers celebrate Halloween with sparklers.

The notion that Halloween is really little more than Samhain renamed has become pervasive in popular culture; books, articles and websites have all routinely ascribed everything from bonfires and pranking to trick or treat to the ancient Celts. A website on Halloween history, for example, states that costuming came about when the Celts ‘dressed as ghouls to fool evil spirits let loose on October 31’.2 The official website for Sweden goes even further, ascribing not just costuming and trick or treat to Samhain, but also jack-o’-lantern carving.³ The Dutch have even tried to claim Halloween’s identity by rewriting history and suggesting that ‘the Celts already celebrated Halloween in the Netherlands’.⁴ The late Austrian folklorist Editha Hürnander saw the use of references to a Celtic past as Halloween was imported into Europe as a kind of label used by the media which provided consumers with a (false) sense of historical continuity and a connection to a distant past.⁵ This ‘branding’ could help to explain why Halloween (a pagan celebration) has been viewed in Europe as – despite the meaning of its name – completely separate from the Christian festivals of All Saints and All Souls.

Culture Clash in Europe

The region of Europe in which 1 and 2 November most closely resemble the English-speaking Halloween prior to its arrival in America is Brittany, the large peninsula to the northwest of France. This is not entirely surprising, since Brittany is considered (along with Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man) to be one of the six Celtic Nations. Breton, still spoken throughout much of the area, is a Celtic language that shares its origin with the Welsh and Cornish tongues, and although the folklore of the region contains no references to Samhain – celebration that was probably confined to the Irish Celts – there is none the less a wealth of eerie, ghostly beliefs centred on All Saints’ and (especially) All Souls’ Days. Around 1900, travel authors were still referring to Brittany as ‘medieval’, and the Bretons believed that the dead returned on Le Jour des morts. Fishermen at sea on All Souls’ Eve risked having their boats invaded by the spirits of those who had drowned, now seeking passage back to land for a proper burial. Those on shore this evening might hear the voices of loved ones who had drowned, begging for prayers to be said in their names. In the Carnac area of Brittany,

peasants . . . believe that on the night of All Souls’ the church is lighted by supernatural means, and in the graveyard the graves give forth the dead, who wend their way along the road, to a church, where Death in the pulpit preaches a wordless, soundless sermon to a vast gathering of kneeling skeletons.6

Throughout most of Brittany, All Saints’ Day was for sombre remembrance of the dead, who were thought to return at midnight. During the day families prayed in church, where ‘Black Vespers’ (prayers made around a catafalque draped in black) were observed as per the Catholic Roman Rite. After the service, the entire parish then visited graveyards, where the priest blessed the graves. In the evenings, they placed food and drink – traditional pancakes and cider – out for deceased loved ones, and fires were left burning in hearths so the dead could warm themselves (these were built around the kef-am-Anaon, or ‘the Log of the Dead’). Bretons retired early on All Saints’ Eve, and avoided leaving home, since the roads were filled with wandering spirits; however, if it was absolutely necessary to venture outside, any small work tool, even a thimble or a needle, carried in a pocket would provide protection against malicious spirits.

Graveyards were an important feature of life in old Brittany, and many featured lanternes des mort; these curious structures were tall (seven to ten meters) stone towers surmounted by a lantern. They were often built in French cemeteries during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. In Brittany, the lanterns were kept burning throughout the night on All Souls’ Eve.

A classic Breton cautionary tale tells of Wilherm (or Yann) Postik, a true son of an eol kornek (the horned angel). Wilherm refused to attend church, and didn’t mourn when his mother, sister and wife all passed away. On All Souls’ Eve, a drunken Wilherm unwisely took a shortcut known to be a road of the dead, and soon encountered a large black carriage driven by the Ankou, the Breton equivalent of the Grim Reaper. Wilherm escaped the Ankou but then met washerwomen wringing out a winding sheet; he recognized among them his dead mother, sister and wife. Before he could respond, he was wound in the sheet, and the next morning he was found dead. When consecrated candles wouldn’t burn near him, those who found him knew he had been damned.

Music also figured prominently in Breton observances. A lengthy gwerz, or hymn, was sung in the graveyard during the day and at night ‘The Death Singers’ moved among the houses, imploring sleepers to arise and pray for the dead.

Beyond Brittany, France has celebrated La Toussaint with graveyard visits on 1 November, but Halloween as a 31 October celebration has never found widespread acceptance there. It is estimated that between 83 and 88 per cent of French people are Catholics and All Saints’ Day in France retains much of its Catholic character, being traditionally celebrated with visits to cemeteries and decoration of graves.7 Chrysanthemums are the flowers of choice – in fact, such is their association with La Toussaint that they are not given as gifts throughout the rest of the year – and traffic routes around cemeteries are clogged to capacity on the day, a public holiday throughout France. Popular cemeteries such as Père Lachaise in Paris are said to draw tens of thousands of visitors.

All Saints’ Day turned political in Montmartre on 2 November 1868. Thousands poured into the cemetery that day to search for the tomb of Alphonse Baudin, a representative of the people who had died seventeen years earlier. Baudin’s tomb had been reported lost for seventeen years, but anger against the Imperial government was at its highest and the searchers finally located the gravesite. After covering the tomb with immortelles and using it as a platform from which to deliver fiery revolutionary speeches, some of the visitors clashed with police. The event led a few liberal papers to call for a memorial to Baudin, which resulted in government fines being levied on their editors.

One of the oddest French references to Halloween can be found in a story from 1836 by Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Story of the Lidless Eye’. The piece is essentially a parody of Burns, and is set in ‘Cassilis’ – no doubt a direct reference to the Burns poems, which begins with a reference to Cassilis Downans – on Halloween. Balzac is in error regarding many of the most basic facts of Halloween, and it’s difficult to know if he was simply unaware of it and its relation to La Toussaint, or if he was deliberately poking fun at Burns. ‘Doubtless, you do not know what Hallowe’en is’, begins one paragraph near the beginning of the story, ‘it is the night of the fairies; it occurs about the middle of August.’ Balzac goes on to refer to Sir Walter Scott as ‘a Scottish peasant’, and describes the wild Halloween revels of ‘boglilles’, ‘brownlilles’ and ‘spunkies’.8

In the mid-1980s, Halloween first began to make some small inroads into French culture and, a decade later, companies like Mc-Donald’s were using Halloween-themed advertising campaigns in France. Disneyland Paris redecorated its Main Street attraction as ‘Spook Street’, pumpkins appeared in markets, and bakers and chocolatiers offered seasonal sweets. In 1996, the town of Limoges inaugurated a parade which drew 30,000 people, and also held numerous costume parties and contests.

However, all that began to change by 2002. In a country frequently described as being ‘keen to protect itself from what it sees as U.S. cultural dominance’,⁹ Halloween – which arrived in France largely on the backs of American businesses like Disney and Mc-Donald’s – proved a relatively unsuccessful import. Halloween retailing in France declined sharply in the twenty-first century, and by 2006 the festival was declared dead in France. The newspapers Le Monde and Le Parisien reported that Halloween in France had already been ‘pretty much buried’, and in reporting this declaration, Forbes. com cited ‘falling sales and anti-Americanism’ as the chief reasons for its failure.¹⁰

Halloween has received a much warmer reception in Belgium, however. Aller-Heiligen Dag, or All Saints’ Day, has been observed there with grave visiting and candle lighting, and All Souls’ was celebrated with the eating of special cakes in the belief that each cake eaten marked another soul rescued from Purgatory. Poor children were said to place tables before their houses with pictures of the Madonna featured thereon in order to beg the cakes from passers-by.

Early twentieth-century visitors to Belgium reported that the country had its own set of spooky All Saints’ Day myths:

Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark and speak to passersby; with the load of their sins upon them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, they beg the passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news of those they loved or hated. And after a brief hour they sink back again into the dust.11

Over the last three years, Halloween’s importation into Belgium has begun to thrive, with even isolated villages now engaging in trick or treat – although in some villages the practice seems to be occurring in the weeks before and after Halloween, as well as on the actual night itself. Halloween’s popularity in Belgium has also gained a considerable boost from the popular amusement park Walibi Belgium, located near Brussels. In 2007, Walibi Belgium introduced ‘Fright Nights’, and almost immediately drew record crowds; the park converted its usual attractions to Halloween themes, and added mazes and scare zones. One difference between Walibi’s haunted attractions and its American cousins seems to be in the way the actors interact with guests: apparently Walibi’s monsters have no personal space issues, and will frequently touch guests or back them into tight corners and refuse to allow them to leave.

In northern European countries, Halloween has recently caught on thanks to the usual combination of retailing, theme parks, and movies and television, but it’s also enjoyed – as is noted on the official website for Sweden – as ‘a welcome diversion in the gathering dark’.¹² These countries still celebrate both All Saints’ Day (with lighting of graves in the evening) and Martinmas (in the Netherlands, children still beg house-to-house on Martinmas, even though trick or treat takes place only eleven days earlier). The Church of Sweden has even used Halloween as a way to further promote All Saints’ Day by teaching Halloween-hungry children about the day after.

The appeal of pumpkins, with their bright orange, easy-to-carve rind and late autumn ripening, seems to be almost universal, and has provided the basis for some of the Halloween festivities now appearing in the Scandinavian countries. The Swedish island of Öland, for example, has turned Halloween pumpkin growing into an important part of its economy, and now holds a Skürdefesten or harvest festival towards the end of every September, complete with a pumpagubbe or pumpkin man (a large harvest figure with a pumpkin head). The summer sun in Sweden shines for eighteen hours a day, which is ideal for sun-loving pumpkin crops. Forty varieties, including giant pumpkins used only in contests, are grown on Öland; pumpkins are rotated with other crops and fertilized with mulch from local livestock, since Swedish farmers pride themselves on organic practices.

In Denmark, the famed amusement park Tivoli Gardens has created a mid-October Halloween celebration that has been drawing record crowds since 2006 and boasts a display of more than 15,000 pumpkins as well as ‘the biggest pumpkin in Denmark’. ‘Halloween in Tivoli’ is slanted towards family entertainment, with a harvest celebration and activities for children. Interestingly, Halloween in Denmark is celebrated a week before 31 October, probably to coincide with a pre-existing autumn school break.

In Germany, where less than a quarter of the population is Roman Catholic, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days have been celebrated, but Halloween is now finding a warmer reception there. All Saints’ Day, or Allerheiligen, was observed with the lighting of special candles called Seelenlichter that were left burning throughout the night. All Souls’ Day, or Allerseelen, was the start of an eight-day period called Seelennächte or ‘Soul Nights’, a time for performing acts of charity or penance. Special cakes – Seelenbrot or Allerheiligen-strieze – are still given out; these sweet breads are made from plaited strands of dough and may be sprinkled with poppy seeds. A number of superstitions were traditionally associated with Allerseelen: hot pans or upturned blades weren’t left out during the evening, for fear that wandering spirits would injure themselves; bowls of fat or butter were made available to soothe the wounds of the dead. Walking three times around a church on this evening would guarantee that a wish would come true, and a girl might leave the house on this night and ask the name of the first man she encountered, since that would be the name of her future husband.

All Saints’ Day was traditionally celebrated with graveyard visits, although the Germans at one time hired mourners for graves they couldn’t visit. This description from Munich in 1892 suggests this practice wasn’t always viewed favourably:

Trick-or-treaters in Sweden.

On the morning of All Saints’ Day the families greet each other over the resting-places of those they loved, arranging, adorning, and praying in faithful hope, or weeping in sad remembrance. There are but few signs of mourning to be seen. Light and life reign everywhere; the loveliest flowers and plants bloom on the graves; cypresses and weeping-willows wave and rustle in the breeze; and if anything reminds us of the chilliness of death or the gloom that we dread, it is the lifeless forms of the hired male and female grave-watchers, who stand near the mounds to tend the lamps and flowers, mechanically repeating their rosary, contemplating sullenly and indifferently the imposing spectacle around them, and longing for the evening, when the reward which has been promised them is to be paid. In the evening these repugnant figures leave the garden, but they take away with them the flowers and lights, and the feast is at an end.13

The more Americanized celebration of Halloween is a relatively recent arrival, and may have begun in earnest in 1975, when an American soldier named Brian Hill organized a Halloween party, broadcast the news over the American Forces Network and drew 5,000 revellers. The event was held at Castle Frankenstein, an actual ruined fortress dating back a thousand years, located a short distance south of Darmstadt. The success of that first celebration led to an annual party. In 1991, the event was scaled back for fear of damaging the ruins and was extended over three weekends to accommodate and spread out visitors. Castle Frankenstein’s Halloween is still held, hosts around 15,000 visitors annually and offers shows, themed areas, special times for children and 80 costumed actors.

Halloween has also been introduced into Germany via television and films, theme parks and retailing. Although films such as John Carpenter’s Halloween and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas have been popular there, the biggest boost to Halloween has been the importation of American episodic television in which Halloween celebrations are commonly featured. As of 2009, Halloween had ‘become part of the cultural capital (and hence of the identity) of a generation of young Germans’.¹⁴

Germany is one of only two countries that celebrate another 31 October celebration: Reformation Day, in memory of Martin Luther’s presentation in 1517 of his ‘Ninety-Five Theses’, which began the Protestant Reformation. In Germany, only five states recognize Reformation Day as a public holiday; however, in Slovenia, the day is a national holiday. By way of contrast, Slovenia – where All Saints’ Day is also a public holiday – has been reluctant to embrace Halloween. Although most Slovenian media have suggested that Halloween is held in contempt there mainly because of anti-American sentiments, the country also seems unwilling to risk replacing its celebration of Reformation Day.

Halloween still has yet to make much of an inroad into Eastern Europe, due partly to deeply ingrained All Saints’ Day observances, but also owing to some other unexpected cultural factors. Pumpkins, for instance: while the happy orange squash has helped spread Halloween through other areas of Europe, pumpkins already had their own special meaning in Ukraine, where they traditionally symbolized a woman’s rejection of a suitor. Even though this tradition has faded, the pumpkin – or harbuz in Ukrainian – retains a negative connotation in Eastern Europe; a business deal might be turned down by saying, ‘I have to hand you a pumpkin on that one.’15

All Saints’ Day – or Dzień Wszystkich Świętych – is a national holiday in Poland, where the number of travellers visiting cemeteries leads each year to an increase in car accidents on 1 November. Local stores sell special headstone-cleaning solutions and at the graveside Poles light special candles called znicz. Radio broadcasts feature the work of late musical artists, and Polish writers and artists also use the day to raise money to restore and remember old monuments and graves. Many Poles also visit the grounds of the notorious Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz i on 1 November, remembering Polish prisoners who died there by placing flowers and candles at graves and even on the train tracks leading into the camp.

Some have suggested that the Polish reverence for All Saints’ Day has made them slow to embrace Halloween. Indeed, American teachers who have attempted to tell schoolchildren about it have found angry parents removing their children from the classroom with an exclamation of, ‘We do not celebrate such a holiday.’¹⁶ Historian Allen Paul has suggested that Halloween’s aura of rowdy indulgence can’t compete with the fierce nationalism generated by Poland’s All Saints’ Day traditions, since Polish lives lost to the invasions of the Second World War and the long struggles under communism are commemorated on this day.17

One Eastern European country, however, has definitely claimed part of Halloween for itself: Romania, home to Transylvania. The popularity of bats as Halloween icons isn’t the only gift that Bram Stoker’s Dracula has given to Halloween: the novel forever transformed the province of Transylvania into the metaphorical capital of all things supernatural, and Romanian locals have embraced the story of the vampire count along with the tourism dollars it has provided. Halloween tours to Transylvania now typically include visits to the Borgo Pass, where the novel’s opening is set; Bran Castle, now dubbed Dracula’s Castle; and Sighisoara, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince known as ‘Vlad the Impaler’, whose name, Dracula – meaning ‘Son of the Dragon’ – inspired Stoker in the creation of his vampire.

In Spain, Dia de Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day) has been observed with the same traditions found in most other Catholic areas of Europe: families visit churches in the morning and then proceed to cemeteries, where they clean and decorate the graves of loved ones. Often they use expensive black-painted brass lamps, which are first lit during the day on 1 November and left burning until the end of the festival. Travel guides in the nineteenth century suggested that All Saints’ Day cemetery visits were less of a religious observance, however, and more of a ‘fashionable promenade’, thronged with vendors and beggars.¹⁸ The festival was kept for three days, during which time most shops were closed to allow daily visits to the graveyards.

All Saints’ Day in Catalonia was until recently a fairly minor festival, celebrated mainly through seasonal foods: chestnuts, sweet potatoes and a special cake called panellet. Although Spanish immigrants brought some other traditions with them, chiefly the visiting of graves on All Saints’ Day, much of Catalonia is secular, and 31 October served more as a recognition of autumn. However, Halloween – distinctly different from the more sombre celebration of All Saints’ Day – has begun to grow in popularity there, disseminated via retailing and schools. Catalonian sociologist Salvador Cardús has suggested that Halloween’s popularity has grown with the number and diversity of immigrants, including many Muslims: ‘Halloween has arrived in our country completely secularized, as a simple celebration of disguises to give you a fright.’19

In many areas of northern Spain, the American ritual of trick or treat has been accepted, and costumed children can now be found parading through the streets on Halloween night. There is one difference between this Spanish trick or treat and its American cousin, however: in Spain, the children visit only shops and restaurants, not private homes.

A popular Catalan sitcom called Plats Bruts, first aired from 1999 to 2002, ran an episode entitled ‘Tinc Castanyes’ (‘I’ve Got Chestnuts’) which addressed the clash between traditional All Saints’ Day observances in Catalonia and Western-style Halloween.²⁰ In the episode, Lopez, a traditional Catalan who is shown preparing panellets for the festival, confronts David, a roommate who is more interested in modern celebrations and who is shown in Halloween costume as a vampire and carving a pumpkin. Lopez complains that the American celebration is ‘imperialist’, but his insistence on celebrating in traditional ways is also mocked.

Italy – which, as the home of the Vatican and the birthplace of All Saints’ Day could certainly be considered the original home of Halloween, as much as Celtic Ireland – has had a long romance with All Saints’ (Ognissanti or Tutti i Santi) and All Souls’ Day, (Il Giorno dei Morti), and is just starting to welcome Halloween into the fold. The Pantheon in Rome, which served to inaugurate All Saints’ Day in AD 609, still holds special masses for All Saints’ Day, which include an orchestra. Visiting cemeteries is practiced on both 1 and 2 November, and has a long – and sometimes strange – history in Italy. In 1888, the Saturday Review described All Saints’ Day activities in Naples, and complained that the graveyard visits ‘degenerate into a pleasure-party’, with visitors maintaining ‘a decent sobriety’ on the way to the cemeteries, but stopping at the numerous inns lining the roads on the way back. This same article describes a church in Ravello that celebrated All Souls’ by placing ‘a disgusting effigy . . . in the court dress of some former century’ before the altar.21 The author admits that he didn’t pause to inquire whether this object was an actual mummy or merely a realistic mannequin.

Some nineteenth-century Italian churches, including La Morte and Santa Maria in Trastevere, were famed for presenting theatrical re-enactments of scenes from the lives of the saints on All Saints’ Day, with the various participants represented by realistic wax figures. In 1868, the cemetery of San Giovanni offered a plague scene featuring the holy man Camillo de Lellis surrounded by ‘Groups of plague-stricken people . . . women gasping, children in dying agony, men whose faces were covered with purple spots and who were foaming at the mouth.’²² But nothing surpassed the realism of a scene presented in the cemetery of the San Spirito Hospital in 1823, when the corpses of those who had recently passed away in the hospital were arrayed in a ring around the waxen figure of an angel with its horn pointed toward heaven. It’s hard to imagine even the most sophisticated twenty-first century haunted attraction surpassing that for sheer shock effect.

As in Brittany and other areas, it was popular to leave food out for visiting spirits on All Saints’ or All Souls’ Eve. In Salerno, until the fifteenth century it was customary to leave a large meal out for the dead before the family departed for church; it was believed that any food left over foretold ill fortune. Apparently – and unsurprisingly – this ritual drew large numbers of thieves to the city.

One of the most interesting seasonal foods found in Italy is fave dei morti, a sweet made of sugar and almonds and intended to represent beans – the same beans, no doubt, that were strewn around the household to drive out spirits on the final evening of the ancient Roman festival of Lemuria. The final night of Lemuria took place on 13 May, the original date assigned to All Saints’ Day.

Food was also begged on the evening of 1 November, but not by children; instead, parish priests went house-to-house, asking for small gifts of food which they shared among themselves throughout that night. Children, however, did figure prominently in one belief from Sicily: on the evening of 1 November, it was believed that the souls of the dead would rise, return to their homes and fill the stockings of good tots with toys and sweets. The little ones were warned not to try to stay awake to view the dead in action; to do so would ensure no rewards, but the children might find themselves touched or tickled by the cold fingers of the spirits.

‘Carnevale’, from Rome ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1865).

Fave dei morti are still made and eaten throughout Italy on 1 November, but cemetery visits are reported to be on the decline. Halloween, however, is finding a home in Italy, much in the same way it has throughout the rest of Europe. Halloween is sometimes referred to as ‘la notte delle streghe’ (‘night of the witches’) in Italy, and both pumpkins and trick or treat have become increasingly popular. In cities like Venice, where elaborate costuming has a long tradition, Halloween is reportedly catching up to Carnevale in terms of the size of the celebrations. Some cities in Italy have also become popular tourist destinations on Halloween: Palermo, for example, is visited for its Capuchin Catacombs, which house 8,000 mummies.

The Russian Debate

Halloween has found an uneasy home in Russia, where its popularity has burgeoned since the 1990s despite fears from some vocal Russians that it has blossomed while traditional home-grown celebrations have been allowed to fade away. Halloween seems to have first been introduced in Russia by American teachers of English, who soon found that it was a favourite with their students. One teacher even used Halloween to stage a mock hanging of the class dunce, an event which understandably drew some parental fire. In 2003, the Moscow Department of Education issued a statement con demning the practice of Halloween activities in schools. However, schools were split over whether to follow the suggestion or continue to celebrate the day. In a interview of 2006, Russian Orthodox priest Mikhail Prokopenko attacked Halloween on both nationalist and religious fronts: ‘The celebration of Halloween in Russia has become quite popular. This fact shows that we should be more careful with borrowing foreign holidays’, Father Prokopenko noted, before adding, ‘a young man or a woman, who dress like vampires or demons, are led to believe that they can display monsters’ qualities in real life’,23 surely one of the oddest criticisms of Halloween on record.

Despite disapproval from both government and religion, by 2010, Halloween in Russia was said to be ‘growing exponentially’.²⁴ Halloween remains especially popular with young adults, and events held at nightclubs on 31 October usually sell out. Some clubs have attempted to ‘Russify’ Halloween by urging patrons to wear Russian-themed costumes and by providing traditional Russian foods and beverages. However, most patrons prefer something more traditional to the American-style Halloween, and vampires, witches and zombies are all on view.

Halloween may be catching on in Russia becuase it is viewed as a way of expressing art on a personal level. The Moscow School of Body Art, for example, encourages students to participate in the festival and to consider its potential as a lucrative part of their careers. As one of the school’s makeup artists explained, ‘From the beginning, Halloween was more than just a holiday. It’s encouraging people to make costumes themselves. It’s a kind of art, which is great.’25

Decadence in the Middle East

Technically, Halloween shouldn’t be found in the Middle East: those of the Jewish, Islamic and other Middle Eastern faiths don’t generally recognize Western festivals, and neither do the governments of the Middle East.

That doesn’t mean Halloween doesn’t exist there, though. In fact, celebrations are not confined to a handful of Americans in a small communal gathering. In a document posted by the controversial WikiLeaks, a US diplomat provided details of a Halloween party that took place in 2009 at the top levels of Saudi Arabian society. The party was thrown by a member of the royal family and broke numerous Islamic taboos, including that against alcohol (sadiqi, a locally produced bootleg liquor, was provided). The event was attended by about 150 young Saudis, nearly all of whom were in costume.²⁶

Halloween is basically non-existent in Israel. They do have the celebration of Purim, which is similarly joyful and does offer children the opportunity to dress up in costume. However, Purim – which celebrates a historic deliverance of the Jewish people – is not other-wise similar to Halloween, despite an infamous quote in 2008 from then-presidential candidate Senator John McCain. ‘As they celebrate their version of Halloween here, they are somewhere close to a 15-second warning’, the Senator noted, referring to the amount of time it takes to escape an attack. Senator Joe Lieberman took the blame for McCain’s gaffe, saying that he had attempted to explain Purim to the candidate.²⁷

Halloween in East Asia

In East Asia, Halloween has chiefly been welcomed by the two centres of pop culture in Asia: Hong Kong and Japan.

Halloween has been celebrated in former British colony Hong Kong with small parties for at least twenty years, but it received a huge boost in 2007 when Disneyland Hong Kong introduced ‘Haunted Halloween’. Strangely enough, the Hong Kong park is the only venue in Disney’s chain of amusement parks that has presented actual Halloween mazes and themed areas, complete with live actors and special effects (in addition to the parades and ride makeovers that the other Disney theme parks receive). Disneyland Hong Kong began with two traditional mazes: ‘Haunted Hotel’ in the park’s Main Street area and ‘Demon Jungle’ in Adventureland. In later years, they added more haunted attractions, including ‘Alien Invasion’.

Since Disneyland Hong Kong first began to heavily promote their ‘Haunted Halloween’, the festival has become very popular throughout Hong Kong. ‘Halloween satisfies Hong Kongers need for a) escapism and b) feeling cozy within large crowds’, suggested CNN Hong Kong editor Zoe Li in 2010.28 Hong Kong celebrates with large-scale parties and costume events; the Lan Kwai Fong district is sealed off to traffic for the evening. Many of Hong Kong’s restaurants offer special Halloween-themed menus for the evening – even pumpkin-flavoured dishes can be found. The morning after also takes on special significance in Hong Kong, but it has nothing to do with visiting graveyards (an activity saved for the Chinese festivals Ch’ing Ming, held in the spring, and Yue Laan, in late summer); instead, the socially savvy Hong Kongers will be busy up loading and tagging their costume photos to their favourite online networks.

In mainland China, where both Ch’ing Ming and Yue Laan are still widely observed, Halloween has just started to become fashionable for a stranger reason than its carnival atmosphere or amusement parks: it’s less frightening than Yue Laan (‘the Hungry Ghost Festival’), when ghosts are believed to walk the streets and are offered food and paper money for use in the afterworld. ‘It’s really not as much fun as Halloween’, noted Beijing website editor Sheila Shi, when explaining why many Chinese young people are showing a preference for Halloween these days.29 Although large-scale Halloween parties in China are still confined to the major cities, young people around the country are celebrating Halloween online, and websites specializing in e-greeting cards have seen a tremendous upswing in Halloween business since 2006. Halloween decorating is also more popular in many areas of China than costuming or parties (and certainly than trick or treat).

Ever since the company Omotesando organized the first Halloween parade in Japan in 1983, celebration of the day has grown annually. Japan’s interest in ‘cosplay’ (costumed play, usually involving dressing up in imitation of a favourite movie or manga hero or heroine) and festivals has led to the easy acceptance of Halloween. Japanese Studies researcher William Patrick Galbraith explains:

The matsuri, or festival, might be seen as a communal experience that allows behaviours outside rigid behaviours and etiquette, one reason this social pressure release valve has been so crucial in Japan historically.³⁰

Halloween costume parades for both adults and children are now popular throughout Japan. Omotesando’s ‘Hello Halloween Pumpkin Parade’ now draws 1,000 costumed Tokyo children, and in Yokohama stores have banded together to offer trick or treat to young visitors. Kawasaki offers a market selling Halloween goods, and Japan has gladly offered up such cultural icons as Hello Kitty to the Halloween merchandising altar. Interest in the history of Halloween is also abundant, and in 2011 several major Japanese newspapers ran articles on Western traditions and lore.

Japanese girls celebrate Halloween, Tokyo, 31 October 2009.

Halloween in the Southern Hemisphere

If Halloween is either already long established or catching on throughout the northern hemisphere, it’s not faring so well south of the equator. While this is perhaps unsurprising in areas where Christianity is not the primary religion, it’s noteworthy that Australia and New Zealand are the only two major English-speaking regions where Halloween has never taken root. New Zealand has actively celebrated Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night into modern times, complete with rhyming, begging and ‘bangers’ (or fireworks), but has virtually no history of Halloween celebrations.

Halloween has chugged along in Australia at a low level, never really being accepted and never quite completely dying out. A few suburban neighbourhoods reported trick or treating activity in the mid-2000s, but the practice seemed to have vanished again by the end of the decade. In October 2010, a seventeen-person group calling itself ‘the Halloween Institute’ tried to lobby for Australian government recognition of Halloween as a public holiday, but their protests were met with little more than shrugs from Australian retailers and amusement from local media, especially given that the Institute’s chairman happened to be the owner of an online Halloween business.

In Africa – where the practice of Christianity continues to rise – All Saints’ Day is a public holiday in a few countries, but Halloween only seems to be observed in South Africa. A South African Wiccan has noted that Samhain in the southern hemisphere must be observed at the end of the April, if the ‘cycles of nature’ are to be properly celebrated.31 In South Africa, there has been a rise in Halloween celebration, complete with trick or treaters and stores stocking Halloween goods, but there’s also been opposition from some Christians. In 2005, the head of the Christian Action Network allegedly decided to protest the ‘diabolical’ celebration by taking his own children on a paintball shooting spree, with trick or treaters as the targets.

Despite such opposition, Halloween has been increasingly embraced by South African’s youth culture. In 2011, there were Halloween rave parties featuring internationally known recording artists (and makeup artists, who provided guests with a Halloween look free of charge), a ten-day ‘Horrorfest’ featuring horror movies and Halloween activities, and a ‘Halloween Jam’ for BMX dirt bike fans, in which many of the riders participated in costume.

Even the parts of South America that are south of the equator have relatively minor observances of Halloween or All Saints’ Day; but Central America is home to Dias de los Muertos, which is surely among the most extraordinary celebrations on earth.