Happy Halloween

Love it or hate it, there's no getting away from Halloween:

Toni:

As you’ll know, Halloween is HUGE in the States. According to one Halloween costume company there are 41 million potential Trick or Treaters this year (aged 5-14). People will spend $1.21 BILLION on adults’ costumes, $1 Billion on kids’ costumes and $310 million on pet costumes.Yes, that's right - pet costumes.  87.78 million houses will give out candy and everyone will consume an average of 1.2 pounds of the stuff. As I said, HUGE.

It’s also quite good fun; people get into the spirit and in my neighbourhood, will decorate their houses on the outside, and perhaps sit on the front porch to greet the kids coming round. Either that or they’re just making sure that no one takes more than a few pieces. Last year we had kids with pillowcases in which to carry their booty.

All the parties happened on Saturday night so there were quite a few “sights” walking round the streets. I may have mentioned in previous years that Halloween costumes here don’t have to be spooky. Kids dress as anything from a Mario brother to a knight in shining armour, and grown men get the chance to dress in women’s clothing without people looking askance at them.

I, for one, went all out this year with the help of a 2^nd hand psychedelic cat suit and a large wig. I went to a party where there was also karaoke, so my look was 70’s Disco Queen. Unfortunately I ended up looking more like a Drag Queen, but it’s all good fun.

 Looking more drag than disco, with my Sith date.

Mike:

Halloween is alive and well in Horsham.  Although I detected a lack of enthusiasm in the run up to the celebrations—merely a few window displays in some of the local shops—today it seemed as if someone fired the starting pistol on all things Halloween.

While wandering around town today many of the store clerks and market stall staff were dressed in costumes and there was a celebration at the band stand where groups of children in Halloween garb got to show off their stuff.  While walking across the street to get a Chinese take away this evening, I saw young people in fancy dress going into town and after dinner I heard the raucous celebrations and saw the fireworks display (which I enjoyed from the balcony while smoking my postprandial cigar) taking place at the local cricket ground.

In addition to this, on the telly tonight, Strictly Come Dancing, QI and some other popular shows have aired (or are going to air) Halloween-themed programs.  Considering that (with the exception of Strictly, which is a live-ish show) these episodes were filmed back in July, it is obvious they have been thinking about Halloween for some time.

What I do not see in any of this is any trick-or-treating, and that is how it should be.  Don’t get me wrong; I love that aspect of Halloween and consider it the very essence of the holiday in the US.  But that’s the thing: Trick-or-Treating is American and is therefore looked upon with misgiving over here.  To have kids showing up at your house demanding candy is akin to a confectionary shakedown.  An article I read while waiting for my take-away—written by the Sussex Police—advised parents, if they were going to take their children trick-or-treating, to visit only the homes of friend or relatives (i.e. people who were expecting them).

So Halloween is not ignored over here, it’s a major part of the autumn celebrations, which do not include pestering strangers for candy.

Oh, and there’s no TPing, either.

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Trick or Treat

Halloween memories are completely different depending on which side of the Pond you grew up on:

Mike:


I grew up with a Trick-or-Treat style Halloween, so it was a bit disconcerting to find it absent here. Now, however, I appreciate not having to stock up on candy over the week leading up to the 31st of October, and then put up with teenagers with no discernable costume (unless you count being dressed in untied sneakers, dropping trousers and a hooded sweatshirt as a costume) knocking on your door and expecting you to hand over the goods.

Trick-or-Treating is as American as a Post Office massacre; Halloween is not; the British do celebrate it. Halloween decorations are all over town as I write this. There will be parties and special events; I just don’t expect to see any Trick-or-Treating. That is an American tradition.

And as an American, I looked forward to Halloween for the candy. When we were little, we would dress up as tramps (old clothes and soot smeared on your face), ghosts (drape an old sheet over your head and have your mom cut eye holes out of it) and other easy to concoct costumes and make the rounds of the nearby houses. This was a difficulty for us as we lived in a very rural area, but my dad could often be convinced to drive us to the nearest town.

All families participated in Trick-or-Treating, and some looked forward to it almost as much as we did. They spent the week before doing up the house in black crêpe paper, gossamer spider webs and fake blood, and making popcorn balls, pumpkin cookies or candied apples to hand out the local children. They would have been disappointed if no one arrived.

As children, even in such a rural area, we managed to drag home a respectable haul, at east enough to see us through to November, where the next candy-laden holiday awaited.

And on 1 November, as we rode the bus to school, we would see the trees along the streets streaming with toilet paper, and the town squares slick with broken eggs and smashed pumpkins. When I finally grew old enough to join the crowd responsible for this, Halloween took on a whole new meaning.

In those times, nocturnal high jinks were expected, and accepted. The nearby town of Stuyvesant Falls had a long-standing tradition of the teenagers setting the bridge on fire and the local police and fire department trying to stop them. It isn’t as bad as it sounds: the bridge had a steel deck and sat over a creek. Lighting a bonfire in the middle of the bridge did no damage and had no chance of spreading. So the kids would plot and the cops would chase them and the firemen would gather in the firehouse just up the road to enjoy a few drinks and wait.

Sometime during the small hours of the morning, the bridge would be set alight, the cops would try to capture those responsible and the firemen would roll down the hill and have a few more beers while they watched it burn. It was good fun for all.

One year, a neighbour who still had an outhouse on her property that she was planning to remove, let us tip it over, so we could experience the mischief her generation used to visit on the neighbourhood. I was privileged to participate in this historic event, but all in all, I have to say, it wasn’t as much fun as setting the bridge on fire.

Toni:

I'm a bit remiss this year as my Halloween decorations aren't up yet. I did get the box (yes, box) down and it's all ready I promise. Look -

here it is, ghoulish plastic fencing for the front, a fake gravestone, and lots of fake spider web stuff to stretch over the fence. My neigbours have had their fronts decorated for two weeks. Halloween is huge in this neigborhood.

I do have three gi-normous bags of sweeties ready for the Trick or Treaters, although we're usually out Trick or Treating ourselves and I end up with twice as much as we started off with.

In our neck of the woods, Halloween is a great family event. Everyone walks around the streets, telling each other which houses are the spookiest and where the best candy can be found. Even people who don't have kids get into the spirit and often dress up to greet us. There's one particular house which is decorated so well it's only in the last few years that the Little Guy has plucked up the courage to walk through the gate!

It's in the costume department that I really come into my own however. All those years of enforced needlework classes at school really pay off come October. In years past my kids have been everything from Bo Peep (complete with paper sheep dangling from the waist band and a visor worn backwards and upside down as the large bonnet), chimney sweeps (black clothes and a painted toilet brush. New, of course), and Marie Antoinette with her head sewn back on (crinoline made from scratch and bloody stitch marks round the neck).

Look at these cute babies (teenagers now) - Flapper dress hand made BTW. 

This year I think I've surpassed all previous efforts however, with Recyclo-bot........

Take one large cardboard box, a computer that's ready for the trash, silver paint, duct tape and a hot glue gun. How fab is this? The sleeves are the legs of an old astronaut costume, and the helmet (still being worked on) is a plastic plant pot covered in foil. Even better is that the 2nd grade lesson "theme" this year is recycling.

People may bang on about how commercial Halloween is etc etc. but this big kid loves it!

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