American-Australian JO KADLECEK says there are good reasons for Australians to resist adopting the US celebration of Halloween…
Sydney, Australia
Before I moved to Australia, I lived a mile from Salem, Massachusetts, a town known for three things: novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the witch trials of 1692 and Halloween. Friends who lived in Salem planned annual getaways the last week of October to avoid the thousands of global visitors coming for one long – and usually bizarre – Halloween party.
Halloween in Salem still means wild costumes, gluttonous drinking and weird tourism. Though some say it’s good for the local economy, I’m not sure it’s great for the town’s reputation or public health.
Children going trick or treating as part of Halloween festivities. PICTURE: AnnaStills/iStockphoto
But no matter. Americans love their Halloween festivities. In fact, the US National Retail Federation estimates that Americans across the country will spend $US10.6 billion this year on costumes, decorations and candy. And experts estimate that $US575 million is spent yearly on Halloween pumpkins alone, exhausting about 80 per cent of the US pumpkin supply simply to carve jack-o-lanterns.
Um, people, there is a global famine happening in half the world, while – I’m embarrassed to report – obesity rates rise in my home country. Certainly, Halloween alone isn’t responsible for either but it serves as a useful lens through which to look at some scary cultural trends, especially because Halloween’s popularity is growing worldwide.
“Whenever I tell Aussie friends about Salem’s October notoriety, they scratch their heads at the absurdity. Yes, they understand that more and more Australians are celebrating with costume parties, house decorations and trick-or-treating each 31st October. And they’re not surprised when they learn that a quarter of Aussies say they’ll celebrate the spooky day this year.”
Whenever I tell Aussie friends about Salem’s October notoriety, they scratch their heads at the absurdity. Yes, they understand that more and more Australians are celebrating with costume parties, house decorations and trick-or-treating each 31st October. And they’re not surprised when they learn that a quarter of Aussies say they’ll celebrate the spooky day this year.
But then they either brush it off as ‘just a dumb copycat of America’ or they resign themselves to the fact they might eventually have to ‘go there’, especially with their kids. But, I say on personal soapbox, there are plenty of good reasons to resist:
1.Though I grew up collecting pillowcases full of candy bars, bubble gum and popcorn balls from my neighbours each Halloween, my teeth today aren’t so happy about that.
2. As I wandered from house to house each year in my suburban neighbourhood, I was terrified at the sight of strangers walking by with blood on their faces and knives stuck in their heads. How was I, as a seven-year-old, to know they weren’t real?
So, yeah, there’s the cavities factor and the fear factor as the first good reasons to resist. But – 3. There’s also, from here looking back, the monumental environmental impact as plastic wrappers littered footpaths and mass-produced candy factories clogged the air with smoke. And 4. God only knows the thousands of workers overseas who weren’t paid a week’s wage for the price my mum spent on a Snickers bar to hand out.
Granted, Halloween isn’t strictly an American absurdity. Legend says it came to the land of the free via Irish-immigrants in the mid-1800s, a way for Celts to bully ghosts back into earth. People wore masks so as not to be spotted by said ghosts, lit bonfires and threw parties to ward of the spirits.
But looking further back in history, the name itself gives its origins away. It’s a variation on All Hallow’s Evening, or what’s known in Christian circles as All Saints Day, hallow being Old English for saint. Some say from as early as the eighth century, All Hallow’s Evening was celebrated to remember the dead, particularly saints and martyrs.
These days in the US, I know of evangelical congregations who condemn Halloween but, so their kids don’t miss out, hold All Saints parties to learn about the martyrs in church history. Other Christians leaning more into supernatural theologies believe Halloween invites spiritual warfare that’s dangerous in every way so they avoid even a hint of it – unless they’re hosting a prayer meeting to combat the spirits. And still other Protestant churches simply hold Harvest Festivals as a way to bring people together around food and avoid the trick-or-treating in their neighbourhoods.
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These alternatives are helpful, but they don’t stop the forces that be from mass marketing the banality of spooks. So, now as an American-Australian, I worry that the great land Downunder – one rife with delicious pumpkins that ought never to be wasted with silly carvings – might fully embrace another form of diversion in an already spiritually-thin culture. After all, Halloween provokes children and adults alike to entertain ideas of evil – as if we needed a holiday for that – just as it invites unnecessary gluttony and harms the land with unnecessary plastic waste.
That Halloween still exists in the US with such glee is proof of the idolatry of profits, the addiction of sugar and the general avoidance of serious reflection about what could make a truly good life. That’s why I’m hoping my fellow Australians will thumb their nose at their cultural cousins this time and recapture the meaning of more historically hopeful holidays like Christmas or Easter.
But if you need further proof of why we don’t need Halloween here, just visit Salem in October.
Jo Kadlecek moved from Boston’s North Shore to the Sunshine Coast eight years ago and now lives just north of Sydney, writing and hoping trick or treaters avoid her home.
