Earlier this week, an American friend invited me to join some other Americans for an evening pumpkin-carving. It was sort of silly how excited I got about it, but it was so much fun! I hadn't made a jack-o-lantern in I don't know how many years.
Perhaps the funniest thing to me: I was in fact able to find a North American-style pumpkin in a grocery store (that's not a given in Germany, where the hokkaido pumpkin rules the roost) but it was clearly being stocked only as a Halloween prop. How do I know? Because it was marketed as a "Kinderhalloween Speisekürbis" ("children's Halloween" pumpkin):
Second funniest thing: As we were all gathered around the kitchen table, hard at work carving jack-o-lantern faces, a German friend walked in, looked around at all the pumpkins and lamented, "You could have made a soup with that."
...Because Germans' primary association with pumpkins is as the main ingredient in pumpkin soup. I don't blame them, frankly. Pumpkin soup is an integral part of the fall season here, appearing on menus at every café as soon as the air takes on that autumn chill, and it's one of my favorite German foods. For better or worse (worse, if you happen to want to bake pumpkin cookies) canned pumpkin doesn't even exist here. When you want to make a soup, you start by cooking the real thing, a whole pumpkin.
At the moment I don't yet have a picture of all our jack-o-lanterns lined up together and lit up inside (they looked amazing) but here's a shot of my own humble offering, by day:
So, Halloween in Germany.
I don't know if it's that Halloween has just this year reached a saturation point in Germany (it's a 100% American import, not something native to continental Europe) or just that I'm thinking about it more this year (see above re: excitement), but over the past few days I've found myself having the Halloween-in-Germany-is-it-a-good-thing-or-not? conversation a number of times with various people.
I have to say, I really love Halloween. I imagine at this point a lot of people probably associate it mainly with the commercialism thrust at us by candy and costume retailers, but for me as a kid, it wasn't about that.
(Admittedly, my hippie childhood may have played a role here... It was a point of pride for me that I – with parental help – always made my own costume, and wouldn't even have thought of buying one pre-made. And for years, I coordinated trick-or-treating for UNICEF through my temple's Sunday school (because, yes, I was that over-earnest sort of kind!) so it wasn't just about the candy.
Halloween was far more about the costumes, and the excitement of going around the neighborhood all evening with your friends after dark with the houses decorated and lit up; Halloween was pumpkins and apples and the crisp smell of cold air and rustling leaves underfoot – in short, all the things that make autumn so wonderfully autumnal. So when I see little German kids out trick-or-treating, I can't help but be excited for them, because, yay, Halloween is so much fun!
Still, though, why should they celebrate this random, imported American holiday? Who decided (ahem, retailers, ahem...) that suddenly Halloween is a Thing and now everyone in Europe has to participate? Adopting new traditions is fine, of course, but what about when they start erasing a country's own traditions?
In this case, the local holiday on which Halloween is unquestionably encroaching is the lovely St. Martin's Day, also largely a children's holiday, which falls less than two weeks later, on November 11. Little kids make lanterns and form processions through the streets, singing St. Martin's Day songs and I think sometimes getting sweets in return (sound familiar?). It's seriously cute, one of my favorite evenings of the year to be walking around the neighborhood. And there's no question that as Halloween ascends, St. Martin's Day declines, because the kids just did the whole procession-around-the-neighborhood thing not two weeks before. Global homogenization and loss of culture – sad.
On the other hand (I think that's three hands, now), a German colleague in my shared office told me her kids' preschool has deliberately replaced St. Martin's Day (a Catholic holiday, which frankly has no place in a public school anyway, in my own American opinion, but this here is a country that does not yet have a concept of separation of church and state...) with Halloween, because it's a non-specific, neutral holiday everyone can enjoy. Smart.
So, I have no grand conclusion there. Just some musings on the intersection of cultures, especially when one (the US, in this case) is particularly dominant.
On another (fourth) hand, I suppose you could also see it as an evolving tradition coming full circle... So far as I know, Halloween indeed began as Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival marking the start of the winter and the dying of the year – counterpart to Beltane (May Day), celebration of spring and rebirth. As so often happens, the pagan celebration got coopted by the Christian church as All Hallows' Eve (the evening before All Saints' Day), then spread to North America with immigrants there, then became a secular event celebrated by everyone, and now has arrived back in Europe in almost unrecognizable form. Much like Santa Claus and the hanging up of stockings on Christmas, which began as St. Nicholas and the setting out of shoes on St. Nicholas Day, with both traditions now oddly coexisting... but that would be another post!
Here, have a last picture of my jack-o-lantern, in the dark on my desk at work:
This is fun to read today because I spent this Halloween at the house of another Obie in New York who lives in a neighborhood with TONS of trick-or-treaters. One of her new housemates is German and she spent the evening on the porch with us completely blown away by the hordes of costumed kids. It's interesting to see the differences through someone else's eyes.
ReplyDeleteHow cool! I love seeing a familiar tradition through someone else's eyes... or in my case here, through the eyes of an entire culture adapting it to their own particular form of usage.
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