I love Halloween. Creating costumes, dressing up, carving pumpkins, making ghoulish food, decorating the house and throwing a party complete with apple bobbing, mummy wrapping and costume competitions is my idea of fun.
In Australia, it's never been a big thing. I've had to sweet talk greengrocers into finding me carving pumpkins; I've ordered my candy corn and jelly pumpkins etc from a specialist US food website; I've created (with one of my best friends) crazy decorations from scratch.
This year, however, things are different. Maybe it's because Halloween is on a Saturday. Maybe it's because - post-Bush - we're allowed to indulge in things American and not feel politically incorrect. Whatever the reason, there has been Halloween stuff everywhere. So much of it, in fact, that I didn't even bother trying to buy my pumpkins until yesterday (we can't carve in advance because they rot in the heat!). And guess what? It seems every pumpkin in Sydney has sold out.
My house, which is normally the spookiest in the neighbourhood, is going to be pumpkin-less. I'm not sure if I'm going to cope ...
2 comments:
Should it make you feel any better, Halloween is just as Canadian, I think, as it is American -- I went out trick-or-treating in the late 50s, early 60s, before the juggernaut of Am. media influence really hit, and Halloween was already well entrenched here with many of the customs that persist today. I haven't had kids at home for years now, and no one dressing up for over a decade, but Pater will pick up a pumpkin today and we'll carve it and put a candle in it so the little ones in their costumes will come visit us and pick up their treats -- hope you manage to have some fun sans jack-o-lantern.
We actually have a few Canadians in our neighbourhood, and they certainly do the full Halloween - I guess I meant North American rather than US! And yes, we did manage sans pumpkins. Kids got dressed up and much candy was handed out. But a lot of people asked me where my jack-o-lanterns were!
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