The Internationalization of Halloween

Posted by: Karyn McCormack on October 30

This item was written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani. She is a freelance financial journalist who guest blogs for Working Parents.

This is my family’s first Halloween in suburban USA (we moved here after four years living in Europe and Asia, prior to which we were in New York) and the one question everyone has for us is: “Did you celebrate Halloween in the other countries you lived in?”

“Yes,” I say, “we did,” because Halloween has been a big deal every place we have lived in or been to, including the small Spanish town of Salobrena, where we happened to be at this time last year, and where during the sacred siesta hour, the only store open was the one selling Halloween costumes.

I first celebrated Halloween 35 years ago as a second grader at the International School of Geneva, Switzerland. I remember quite clearly a class party organized by an enterprising American mother, and a rather itchy black skirt and turtleneck top my mother put on me for a witch’s costume. We bobbed for apples and I tasted candy corn for the very first time.

Every subsequent year was a big year for Halloween at my elementary school, and in all the schools that my children have attended around the world, they have always had Halloween. Outside the context of a school, it’s now also quite common for children in my hometown of Geneva to knock on my parents’ door on Oct. 31 and shout "trick or treat" in a French accent.

Not everyone is happy about this. A French friend believes the internationalization of Halloween is just another example of how "Americanized" the world is becoming. A Spanish lady at the last school my kids attended was upset that the Fiesta de los Reyes Magos was not given even a nod, whereas everyone went nuts over Halloween.

Even here in the United States, I read, some people do not partake in Halloween (see this link as well as this one about Muslims from BeliefNet). But in our family’s experience across the world, Halloween is one of those universal celebrations that really can bring together people from all different parts of the globe and all walks of life, and nothing brought that more home to me than the Halloween we spent a few years ago in the small Southern Indian city of Mysore, a place even farther removed from Halloween than the South of Spain.

One American mother living there at the time did not want her daughter to miss out on Halloween, so she decided to throw a party for the neighborhood expat kids. She had brought some treats along with her from the U.S., and orange and black craft paper to make spiders and pumpkins out of, and she enlisted a local tailor to make a beautiful Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz) costume for her daughter. The same man fashioned an Alice in Wonderland dress for my daughter and a Power Ranger outfit for my son.

A bunch of people from different parts of the world – the UK, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Italy – readily agreed to be on the trick-or-treating route, and as our small group of children walked through the narrow, potholed lanes of that Mysore neighborhood, some of them threw down sweets from their balconies. The kids rushed in all directions to pick them up and there was great laughter and excitement.

Then suddenly, a small girl in a tattered pink frock, a frayed ribbon hanging from her braid, darted forward and quick as a flash, grabbed a chocolate bar before anyone in our group could get their hand on it. She was part of a group, too, a group of dirt-poor kids from the neighboring slums that had been following us on our walk. In a matter of minutes, the children from both groups began to playfully fight over the candy. But only for a minute – because then the children in our group let the others have it all, and like us, just seemed to want to enjoy the looks of joy on the others’ faces as they scooped up handfuls of treats they had never tasted in their life and might never taste again, and fingered the beautiful costumes.

My children and others will always have Halloween. But for those others, it was only a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. To be able to share it with them was what it was all about and what made it a Halloween I’ll never forget.

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