(Originally posted as a comment to Jenni’s LJ, here)
Halloween is a great example of how culture and tradition works.
Definitely Halloween as it’s known here is driven by US influences. As I understand it, it was kinda dead here until the movie E.T. came out and made a big deal out of trick or treating. The commercial influences are a big driver but we’re slowly working out a way of integrating it into our culture – and it seems the main way we do it is by ignoring it except for holding costumed/spooky events at the time.
Halloween is indeed timed with the harvest, but it’s more than just a harvest festival – Samhain marks the end of summer and the beginning of winter, and is a way of talking about the deep psychological effects of the seasons (which are far more ‘real’ in the northern hemisphere than here in the southern). This is why Halloween is a spooky night – the ghosts and ghouls and spirits are connected with night time, and the long nights begin now.
Except here in NZ, they don’t. Rightly speaking, our spooky festival should be linked in time with our harvest festival, and we don’t have either. I firmly believe that our culture would benefit from a spooky festival, because I think one of the fundamental human experiences is to be afraid of the dark and the unknown and celebrating fear and mystery allows us to process and tame that fundamental experience.
One of the signs that New Zealand is such a young culture is the fact that our festivals are nascent and clearly still settling down.
Our family-bonding-event is Christmas (in the US this role is taken by Thanksgiving). It is slowly losing its midwinter associations and gaining associations with the beginning of summer. I think our Christmas is well on the way to becoming a quite distinct celebration attuned to our cultural needs; here it means the beginning of reliable good weather, the time of rest and family holidays and getaways, and also the bonding of family ties – all these strands fit well together, so I think our Christmas is gonna keep getting more and more distinctive as it goes along.
Our Festival-Of-National-Myth is currently being fought out between ANZAC day and Waitangi Day, with ANZAC day a clear winner for the moment but neither really winning in the grand scheme of things. Eventually we will become able to celebrate ourselves, and one of these two days will be when we choose to do it. Unless we end up a republic, and Republic Day will win out.
Our social-structural-justification day is Labour Day, and like such days all around the world (except for places where the social structure is heavily contested) is low-key but not going anywhere.
I’m still unsure what Easter is in our scheme. I’m not sure we as a culture have any particular need for a chocolate festival, and despite the best efforts of Christianity this most sacred event is becoming just that. I believe that unless it fulfills some deep cultural need its status will keep eroding until it becomes entirely incidental to our cultural landscape. Again, the lack of clearly-defined seasons stops this from really working as a beginning-of-winter celebration – there’s nothing in it at all that relates to those ideas. I think Easter is our most incoherent festival and will be the one to change in character the most in our lifetimes.
10 thoughts on “On Halloween”
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what about the Rgby Sevens? They have a huge cultural impact on Wgtn at least, and if they continue the way they are it’s just going to get bigger.
I’m really into the Chocolate Festival, personally.
Ooh, good one! Although not a national festival, the Rugby Sevens is rapidly becoming our equivalent of Carnival or Saturnalia. Good spotting!
I think one of the reasons that Easter seems irrelevant other than the Chocolate is the same reason that Hallowe’en doesn’t match with the Harvest festival – it’s northern-hemispherally supposed to be a spring festival and on that basis at completely the wrong end of the year in New Zealand – celebrating fertility and new life (or the resurrection or whatever) is possibly a bit less relevant in the teeth of the first howling southerly of the winter (as so often happens at Easter). Perhaps our response to that is to make it irrelevant except for the chocolate.
“I’m not sure we as a culture have any particular need for a chocolate festival”
Clearly, you don’t eat enough chocolate.
Halloween is not only linked to the harvest. This Sunday (closest to 1 Nov) is All Saints’ Day where the Church community honours all the Saints that have been and gone. All Souls’ Day (31 Oct) is the day before, where we remember ALL who have passed (e.g. Grandmas and other rellies) and of course that evening was known variously as All Hallow’s Eve, or All Hallowed Eve, which is remarkably like the word we now know as Halloween.
Incidentally, I hate the thought of kids trickortreating/BEGGING at my house – certainly not always safe in this day and age, and does ANYONE know what to do if I say “treat”?
I certainly don’t. Most kids will say “Oh … Can I have some lollies?”
You seem to have missed Valentine’s Day off your list. Is there a reason?
Fish – you’re right of course, but that association of Halloween is largely absent from our cultural discussion. That means a lot to me personally, but I don’t see it having any traction with NZ-at-large.
(Contrast with Mexico, where I spent last Halloween – their Day of the Dead is all about All Souls day, and the Halloween-type elements are very much recent commercial add-ons.)
All that said, a day for the remembrance of family gone is a splendid and valuable basis for a festival.
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Svend – yeah, I forgot Valentine’s Day. This is because I Hate Love.
But Morgan, didn’t you know that Love Is The New Hate? Boom boom.
re: Halloween = All Saints Eve.
They’re the same festivals for same reason, just with various levels of co-option of harvest/end-of-summer rituals by whatever religion we’re looking at.
Either way, still the wrong festival for this season in New Zealand. This is spring festival time… which leads me to what I feel is developing as our antipodean way of celebrating Beltane – the food and wine festival!
At least, there seems to be a lot of these that occur around the country at this time; often in conjunction with that other NZ tradition – the spring garden festival.
The previous spring-time tradition was the spring racing carnival (which often contained celebrations of food, drink and gardens), but I’d feel this has slipped off the radar a bit in NZ (though still going strong in Victoria, Australia).
Hmm, I must’ve grown up in the wrong part of New Zealand: we were doing the Hallowe’en thing in the late 70s and ET came out in 1982. I can remember our school doing a Hallowe’en Day in 1979 where everyone came in costume and then each class did a circuit of the basketball court to show off their costumes to the rest of the school.
In our neighbourhood, we always treated treat or treating as a trade: you had to provide a trick to get a treat. From what I’ve seen of US traditions, “trick” either seems to mean “tricked because you didn’t get a treat”, or “performing an act of vandalism on the person who didn’t give you a treat”. For us tricks tended to be magic tricks, joke-telling etc…
I’d note that this tended to be restricted to “safe houses” – which was a reasonable amount of territory – so it tended to be the same group of children and the same or similar guidelines. Later on, I remember kids having no idea about this version of things – they’d just say trick or treat and hold out their hands. This annoyed my mother because it flew in the face of all she’d known about Hallowe’en. Just as I can remember doing the Hallowe’en thing in the late 70s she can remember it as part of the late 40s.
Hopefully that muddies the waters.