“Halloween”
Sorry, Sweden, you don't really celebrate it :/
After Christmas, the holiday that holds the largest (and warmest) place in my childhood memories is Halloween. Every year on October 31st, I would dress up as something or other, grab an old pillowcase, and head out trick-or-treating with whichever of my three younger brothers was old enough to join. Often, especially when we were on the younger side, one of my parents would come with us, pulling a red Fisher Price wagon with one or more baby brothers in it, then hanging back on the sidewalk while us older kids ran up to houses with our increasingly heavy bags of loot.
Halloween often fell on a school night, so we’d usually head out right after an early dinner, even if it wasn’t quite dark yet. But the special Halloween atmosphere really kicked in once the sun set and the jack-o-lanterns began glowing more brightly, their eerie orange flickering lighting the way up the dark pathways to unknown doors. Plenty of people decorated their lawns and porches elaborately, with fake cobwebs covering bushes, stuffed spiders hanging from trees, and plastic skeletons lounging in deck chairs. But the most exciting thing for me was the carved pumpkins. I loved not only the strange shifting lights transforming my bland residential Scarborough neighbourhood, but also the variety of carvings and pumpkins: some people got huge ones and carved them to look like cats, others engraved full spooky landscapes, and some chose to carve twenty little ones with tiny grinning orange faces lining both sides of the walks up to their recessed porches.
A few people didn’t have the orks to deck their lawns or porches out, even with a pumpkin, but you’d know they were ready for the candy-knock if they left their porch light on. Going around the long city blocks in our area, a few houses here and there would be dark, but most were open for business. The best houses gave out those small bags of chips or mini chocolate bars; the worst gave old lollipops or single squares of small hard pink chewing gum. My brother Adam and I would have elaborate unrealistic collection goals—this year we’d fill a whole pillowcase…no, two…three!—less because we wanted candy forever (although of course we did) and more for the sheer fun of the challenge. But have you ever tried carrying a pillowcase full of candy? It’s heavy, and awkward to hold; even the most ambitious 9-year-old can only lug it so far1. So Adam and I always fell short of our goals, but the hauls were still substantial, and perhaps the most fun part of all was getting home again and dumping the entire pillowcase contents on the living room floor for sorting.
Prefiguring, perhaps, my love of noun declension charts, with their neatly delineated sections, I took great pleasure in dividing my Halloween candy into categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, each with its own place on my section of the living room carpet. My brothers did their own versions of this and then the trading began. Adam was popular in this marketplace, since he was the only one who liked Coffee Crisp bars, (which somehow seemed to turn up in droves in everyone else’s pillowcases), while my goal was usually to connive my way into as many little bags of plain potato chips as possible.
Everything would then be loaded back into the pillowcases and taken to one’s bedroom, for, in my case, a slow nursing of their contents, enjoying one or two items a day to make the haul—and the warm flickering memory of the evening, when everything familiar was transformed—last as long as possible. Because Halloween was, in my Toronto childhood, så mysigt2—the first and only widespread mysigt tradition on North American shores until Christmas.
Sweden, home of mysigt, has plenty of magical cozy fall traditions, all of them involving flickering lights in the midst of windy damp darkness, but none of them are Halloween. And that is, of course, just fine; cultures and places are different, even in this globalized commercial mono-cultural age, and the Swedish tradition of Lucia, as well as their full month of advent lights in nearly every window are, especially as an adult, absolutely as magical and cozy as Halloween—if less nostalgic for me personally.
So when the end of October comes and people here in Sweden say (and, I’m sure, genuinely think) that they’re ‘doing’ Halloween, I frankly just wish that they…wouldn’t. Not because it offends me3, but because, when you miss something, a pale dribble of imitation of that thing—done in whatever earnestness—can make you miss it a lot more than if there were simply no reminders at all.
Because here in Sweden, knowledge of Halloween has come primarily from Hollywood and other forms of mass-transmitted North American culture, and attempts at adopting it are recent, patchy, and overall more about student dress-up parties than kiddo trick-or-treating. There is a Swedish phrase now for ‘trick-or-treat!’—bus eller goodis4, which is very cute—and some kids (usually older ones) do valiantly dress up and try to go out candy-collecting. The problem is that, in order to make trick-or-treating work, you really need a critical mass of participating households, and that’s far from the case here.
Instead of North-American-style Halloween, many people here are observing All Hallows’ Eve/All Saints’ Day—which also falls on October 31, and is, of course, historically related to Halloween. It’s a quiet, sombre holiday where one puts a candle outside one’s home and perhaps makes a respectful visit to the grave of a deceased friend or family member. This would make it a bit…gauche to cover one’s lawn in fake skeletons or enormous wavering mummy inflatables, so no one does (at least as far as I’ve seen); at most, they put out a jack-o-lantern, but even these are few and far between. This makes it hard to trick-or-treat with any success, which then compounds the problem—as does the fact that no one seems quite agreed on what night to head out door-knocking, or which doors one should knock on. This year, for example, we—on the walk-up third floor of a low-rise apartment building displaying precisely zero Halloween decorations—had two little groups of trick-or-treaters ring our doorbell: one on October 31 and one on November 1. Both cute, valiant, misguided sets of little visitors rang at like 9 p.m., which is well past when Halloween houses usually close up ‘shop’ where I’m from (and also woke up our four-year-old).
This date confusion arises partly, I assume, from a desire to avoid overlap with the tonally very different All Hallows’ Eve holiday, and partly out of the aforementioned patchy understanding of the traditions being imitated. It also probably stems from another clash with longer-established traditions: Swedish schools have a week-long break in the autumn as well as the spring; this break (called höstlöv, literally autumn-leave) usually falls on the same week as Halloween, and during it, any family with the means is often away on vacation—leaving even more houses dark and void of candy.
All of these things together mean that, as far as I’m concerned, Halloween just doesn’t happen here, and I go about my business accordingly. So when, on October 31 this year, I happened to be walking home from the bus stop in the early evening (around 6pm), I wasn’t thinking about Halloween because, to me, it wasn’t Halloween—not here. So I was initially surprised, as I walked, to notice the occasional small cluster of costumed children on adjacent sidewalks, and the even more occasional candlelit, carved pumpkin perched outside a cute little Swedish home.
‘Oh, right,’ I thought, ‘it’s “Halloween”. ’
And, for maybe the first time since moving here, I felt homesick.
Pippi excepted, naturally. In this one sense it’s a tragedy for Pippi that she’s Swedish; she was made for Halloween.
‘So cozy’…..but that doesn’t really capture the meaning of the Swedish, because mysigt is one of those annoying/enchanting words whose meaning is bound to its cultural context.
It’s not cultural appropriation when the culture in question is from the dominant global power and it’s being shoved down your throats constantly.
bus is pronounced “boose” (so, goodis rhymes on the first syllable); it means, loosely, “mischief,” while goodis is candy (the English cognate is “goodies,” as in goody-bag).