Skip to main content

The Halloween post

My concession to Halloween
There was no such thing as Halloween in Iceland when I was growing up. We celebrated (and still do) in a similar manner at carnival time - i.e. on Ash Wednesday - and demolished a piñata, although the piñatas we demolished were really wooden barrels that took a lot of whacking before they broke, and there was not a prize inside but rather one was presented afterwards to the person who dealt the death blow to the barrel.
This is called "beating the cat out of the barrel" and legend has it that there once used to be an actual dead cat inside the barrel. It is actually quite a Halloween-like tradition if you think about it.

Later, when I went away to boarding school in Akureyri, I became familiar with the tradition of dressing up and going singing from door to door in the shopping district to get candy on Ash Wednesday, sort of like trick-or-treating in the USA, only with singing and no trickery.

I think, although I can't be absolutely sure, it was Hard Rock Café that introduced Halloween to Icelanders, although we of course were familiar with it from American movies and TV series. There was a Hard Rock Cafe here in the 1990s (it closed in the early noughties, I think, but a new one will be opening soon), and every Halloween they would promise a free meal (or maybe it was a drink - I can't quite remember) to anyone who came in to dine wearing a costume on Halloween.

Then shopkeepers realised that here was a chance to sell stuff, and it took off - sort of. You can now buy large pumpkins for carving, and Halloween decorations are available in many shops, and you can spot the occasional adult wearing a costume in public on Halloween, although it is, in fact, mostly celebrated by kids, who love an excuse to wear costumes and have school costume parties.

Trick-or-treating (without actual tricks) also happens, albeit on a more limited scale than on Ash Wednesday, usually with certain neighbourhoods deciding to participate and participating homes marked with balloon.

There is no religious aspect to Halloween in Iceland, as most of us are Protestants of some kind and the religious aspects are too Catholic for us, and we observe it purely as a secular celebration.

It's still much more common for kids in Iceland to dress up for Ash Wednesday than for Halloween, but it is becoming more common and I expect it will continue to grow in popularity. The most noticeable difference between the two celebrations is the horror aspect of Halloween. You don't see many mummies, zombies, witches and skeletons on Ash Wednesday, but there is a proliferation of them on Halloween, along with fake blood, carved pumpkins and other necessary accoutrements.

I see no harm in celebrating Halloween - any excuse to have a bit of fun at this time of the year is a good one - but I dearly hope that Halloween does not destroy the old Ash Wednesday tradition.


Labels:

Comments

Trish said…
I alway love to hear how other parts of the world mark the closing of the season. It sounds like many different cultures have similar dark and spooky traditions this time of year. Thanks for sharing your experiences!
October 31, 2016 3:01 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more