Nah legit the one part of anglo/American culture I will defend with my whole chest this shit is dope and the more of it that exists the better

I'm not sure how to break this to you, but Halloween is European. Halloween was invented in Ireland, from the pagan celebration of Samhain. Even the practice of dressing up in costume and going from door to door asking for food is recorded as of the 16th century at the latest. Pranks, as well as "Mischief Night," also dates from the 18th century at the latest. This is all pre-Americanisation. It's not a continental European tradition but it's certainly European, not American.

Apart from the plastic shit everywhere I think I can get behind some spooky fun. It's so tiring stuffing all these apples with razor blades and heroin though.

Halloween is one of the few things America appropriated and made cooler. No disrespect to the Irish OG's that made it, mind you.

Halloween is fun shut up

When the communist revolution happens not only will Halloween remain as an informal Holiday: All saint day will become an official federal holiday to ensure there is no work or school the day after!

TBF doing a big ass Fourth of July display in England would be a pretty funny troll job. Especially if you played up the French collaboration angle.

Halloween? At least it got some social meaning behind it.

Wait until you realize how many countries specialy in the global south have "Black Friday" discounts now. I don't think there is anything quite as pathetic other than being a literal gusano.

Anyway one of the best examples of cultural imperialism by capitalism, shoving some meaningless sign in the language of the imperial core to signify a holiday that these people don't even celebrate.

I don't know if there is a better source somewhere or if it was discussed before, but anyway its quite obvious even on the wiki entry just look at the around the world section and you'll notice it literaly became a thing "overnight", since 2010s with the growth of online retail around the world.

Actualy thinking about it now its quite scary to think, western capitalism was extremely effective here.

Halloween comes free with your subscription to movie & tv monoculture having happened.

Sorry, boomers existed and they made capitalism mandatory, and now we're stuck with the consequences forever.

The calvinist countries went too far in abolishing its traditional holidays and now they have to import foreign ones to mend its ecosystem.

Of all things you could complain about with Americanization, you complain about Halloween? The best holiday ever conceived by any culture ever?

Whatever. Youre missing out on the only semi decent holiday in existence.

I don't think that anyone in their right mind would say that we are suffering from an overabundance of joy in the world.

Nobody is forcing you to celebrate Halloween but it's okay to abide people having harmless fun. Life is short and far too often it's filled with misery and suffering and there's no need to add to your own misery unnecessarily, especially when it's because other people are celebrating.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love [for the people]. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

— Che Guevara

bad news, halloween is the best thing that US hegemony ever gave you

So in the 1990s my mom left the occupied Dakota land where she was born, to live in Norway, the country of birth of her grand-to-great-great-grandparents. This means that I was raised bilingual in English and Norwegian, with two passports. By extent I have a fairly complicated relationship to nationality, and in particular to "American-ness".

And one example of this complicated relationship is with Halloween. Because I would've been born right around the time when Halloween was first starting to gain a foothold in Norway, right? So I got to basically witness firsthand, what was initially a tradition specific only to my and a few other US emigrants' families, meant to remind us of our family back in the occupation zones and basically just celebrate being born abroad... Become something celebrated nationally by children with no real familial connection to the holiday. Halloween went from something that I could share with people — something that I could invite my friends to celebrate as a unique experience — to something ubiquitous across basically the entire country.

On the one hand, I was glad that I could with time get more booty from trick-or-treating; my mom was glad that it was easier and easier to get decorations and pumpkins to carve... But on the other hand, I also kinda resented the popularization of Halloween in Norway. I resented how, as you say, marketing ghouls as well as media imported from America had managed to essentially airdrop an entire holiday into a new country. Norwegians even refer to the holiday by its English name, "Halloween" — so Halloween definitely has the vibe of something transplanted here for marketing purposes.

I mean, it's not the worst, because Halloween is a fun holiday. I understand why people want to celebrate it even without any real personal connection to it, and it's perfectly fine to do so; and Halloween also feels like a distinctly children-to-young-adult-oriented holiday, which means that celebrating it can still be a way for me to connect to youth culture, right?

But nevertheless, I guess my point with this is that even from a pretty young age, I had already grown to despise American cultural hegemony specifically because I was an American in Norway. I saw American cultural hegemony as simultaneously cheapening my own family's ways of celebrating our origins and relatives; as well as actively harming the culture of the country where we lived, all for the sake of profit. So I basically wanted Americans in Norway to be just another immigrant group, in the same way as Eritreans or Pakistanis or Lithuanians or Peruvians. The English language, as I saw it, should've been equal in status to Urdu and Polish; American media should've been equal in status to Russian and Chinese; American culture all the same. I'd say this is what sets me apart from a large portion of the anti-Halloween crowd in Norway, which in my experience is dominated by old, racist curmudgeons who don't want any sort of cultural exchange, whereas I have just always dreamed of cultural exchange without hierarchy.

...But at the same time, is my dream of American culture being equal to the cultures of other countries really possible, when American culture is itself a bit of an unnatural, new thing? Like, Halloween as I know it is only as old as my grandparents. It originated as essentially a marketing-bastardized appropriation of an Irish holiday. So mainstream (read: white) American culture is really just a series of appropriations put in a blender, flattening the actual diversity of the different immigrant communities in the United Occupation Zones — because this flattening of diversity is necessary for establishing and upholding the racist hierarchy that the entire nation is built on.

So... I guess that makes my feelings towards Halloween kinda hypocritical? Like, what is playing out in Norway right now is what already played out in North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Irish immigrants probably felt similarly about Samhain getting turned into mass-produced costumes, as I feel about the plastic tchotchkes flooding Norway's shopping centers today. I'm acting possessive over something that was never mine to begin with.

So what I do to commemorate my relatives living on occupied Dakota land kinda validates that selfsame occupation. It's fundamentally different from, like, Kurds celebrating Nowruz and stuff, and so it can't really be treated the same, can it? What my family does to celebrate our "heritage abroad" is really just commemorating, like, four generations of children who were born on stolen land, before one of them returned to where she really had her roots. So Halloween is really just... a souvenir of our family's brief time in North America. It isn't some sort of honorable tradition we've had for many generations.

Why is it so hard for me to just accept that? And why do I still feel some sense of pride from flying the Stars & Stripes, while I simultaneously never hesitate to say "Death to Amerikkka!"? Why do I find so much beauty in speaking and writing the language that was forced on my great-grandparents, while simultaneously decrying that language being similarly forced on my peers in the present?

...I dunno, isolation, propaganda, and privileged laziness, I guess.

Sorry for the ramble, sorry if this doesn't really make much sense, this is just stuff I've been chewing on for a while.

stop pretending europe exists

it's just northwest asia

Here it's the time to get drunk and flirt with goths.

Gotta pump you full of single-use plastics and corn syrup somehow.

At least Halloween is fun

Fourth of July fucks with animals and the sound-sensitive

Halloween is dope you get to dress up and get drunk with your friends what else can you ask for in a holiday

Get in the mech costume, Sweden

count your blessings - people around here already have christmas decorations up

This is All Saint's Eve erasure

This reminds me of and American friend who was in the UK for a few years and during his first Bonfire Night, some kids knocked on his door and said "Penny for the guy?" And he said "no" and just shut the door lmao

We're going to make all of you celebrate 4th of July and Thanksgiving. UK gets Canadian Thanksgiving, EU gets American

I like Halloween, but I dislike how it's basically replaced Nos Calan Gaeaf as a holiday.

Less mask and sweets, more hurrying home at the stroke of midnight before the last ember in the bonfire dies lest the white lady drags you to the afterlife.

Not even to speak ofblack Friday, it makes my blood fucking boil

But it makes October one of the few months where I can dress goth in public without the weird stares and the occasional stalker following me around the store when I grocery shop like I’m some sort of rare mythical creature.