Wow. We just had our first trick-or-treaters… as in, ever! I’ve seen the Halloween-y accoutrements stealthily making their way into supermarkets and craft stores in the last few years, but this is a first for us.
I’m not anti-Halloween per se. I do despair the ‘Americanisation’ of Australia in general (uh… no offence meant to the majority of you guys ๐ ), and hey, if we’re going to celebrate a pagan harvest festival, then we could at the very least do it at the right time of year (ie 6 months from now, for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere). But really, any event that involves costumes and copious amounts of sugar has my vote :giggle: That said… I just wish the kids who arrived at our door could have gone to a little bit more trouble than black tracksuits and plastic supermarket bags, know what I mean? One had on a ‘scary’ mask, another had on a green wig, but apart from that, I was seriously underwhelmed by the completely crappy ‘costumes’. (We’re talking about young teenagers, btw, not eight-year-olds).
Oh well. Luckily we had ‘treats’ on hand, what with having been to the Bendigo Show at the weekend, so I didn’t let them go empty-handed. But if Halloween is going to make its way into the Australian calendar, I hope we see a little bit more ingenuity next time.
I agree Mel. We have been having door knockers for awhile and I told the kids that I would give to them this once but if they come back next year I want to see them dressed up properly. I would never let my boys do it. One year our American daughter was living with us at Halloween time and she lectured the door knockers good and proper. She told us that if the front light is not on (in the states) then the home dweller does not participate in the event and it is bad manners to go to the door. We are a bit lucky as people have to come through a front gate and the path is dark. They are generally to frightened to come to the front door after dark. No door knockers this year or last year for that matter.
Janine
Trust me, I too am upset about the overcommercialization of all of the holidays. Halloween has become totally about demanding sweets, and if my daughters weren’t in full costume (and my teenager accompanying her little sister to justify her presence at all), they wouldn’t go. I do withhold my normal distribution of candy from … shall we say less imaginative teenagers. I live in an apartment, let em egg me for being a Grinch (although it hasn’t happened yet!).
Janine is absolutely right about the *rules*, and the police departments here do a very good job of going around to all the schools in the week leading up to Candy Day to make sure the kids know em: Only visit houses that have their porch lights on, no eating anything until your parents have checked packages (to make sure they aren’t damaged, we’ve had instances of poisoned candies in past years), never go inside someone’s home unless you know them personally and well, all homemade treats are automatically to be considered unsafe unless they’re from a known trusted source. And in the last few years, the police have also been doing home visits to all registered sex offenders to make absolutely certain they know that they are NOT to have their porch lights on or to answer the door on Halloween.
Last year some towns (including mine) were putting signs or flags or something on registered homes, that received a lot of publicity and news coverage and may have been discontinued. It was a great way of making sure the kids knew to absolutely NOT go to a certain home, but it was also decried as a Scarlet Letter sort of thing and a violation of the offenders’ rights. I think one lawsuit over the Halloween alerts is still pending.
As for the time of year, though, I know you guys are in mid-spring, but it *is* the right time of year for us!!! ๐ And I believe it was an extension of Samhain and was originally celebrated in what is now Ireland and Great Britain by the Celtic pagans. I might be wrong there…
In any event, Happy Halloween from one of *you guys* up north!!!
No offense taken. I think that a lot of countries tend to become Americanized. Too bad your trick or treaters weren’t a little more into the spirit of things. I suspect it had to do with their age. We used to get trick or treaters like that when I was a kid and the teenagers rarely dressed up much.
Jenn, you’re right, of course it is the right time of year for the Northern Hemisphere to be celebrating Samhain/Halloween, however if we were going to mark the old festivals, we should be doing so on a six month different time frame from you, since the Pagans were all aout following the seasons of the earth. I know that Halloween is not a lot about its origins anymore, but surviving traditions (pumpkins, for example) don’t translate well to this hemisphere – we’re busy putting our pumpkin seedlings in over here, not harvesting them! In the same way, when we celebrate Yule/Christmas, all the ice and snow makes absolutely no sense in an Australian context.
You know, it was just today that I was talking with a coworker and he told me that Halloween isn’t celebrated in Australia! For some reason I thought it was a worldwide thing, not just North America.
No trick or treaters here in suburban Sydney last night. Although we do live down a battleaxe driveway, so no one would really bother anyways. There were smashed eggs on the footpath and roving packs of screaming teens on the main streets. The only place I saw decorations were in the sweets isles of the shops.
As a friend mentioned yesterday, it’s hard to get into the spirit of halloween in Australia, when the nights aren’t spooky and dark – it’s light until 7pm and 20 degrees outside!
We had one trick or treater, a teenager with no attempt at dressing up at all.