Halloween goes on holiday

Nov. 1: Warsaw

Here in Poland, in Warsaw’s Old Town of all places, grinning jack-o-lanterns greet customers at restaurants’ doors. Granted, Stare Miasto is a sort of romantic tourist trap, so it’s not so unbelievable that businesses would pander to obviously American sensibilities.

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When I first got to London, it was mid-October, and Halloween was on the horizon. (Rubber witch masks at Selfridges!) I jumped at the opportunity to grill two non-Americans — one a Scot, the other French — on what they thought about what is probably every American’s favorite holiday (after Christmas, of course).

Bazil, the Scot, described a childhood ritual involving jack-o-lanterns carved from turnips (no pumpkins in the Orkney Islands) and lots of parading around banging pots and pans to scare off bad spirits. Or so his mother told him that’s what all the clanging was for.

Halloween for him resembled rituals in lots of other cultures; his account reminded me of something Chinese or Japanese — in particular of Setsubun, where the father puts on a demon mask and charges through the front door. The children throw beans at him, thus scaring off the oni. When I was in Japan, the school passed out beans to everyone on Setsubun, along with an illustration instructing us how to use them (toss liberally in direction of demon). Not having a readily available masked father to throw them at, I kept the beans and took them back to Los Angeles with me — in case a demon ever came through the front door.

Max, the Frenchman, on the other hand, rejected (maybe on cue) the cultural imperialism of American Halloween. Apparently in France, the previously nonexistent holiday had reached a perfect crescendo of merchandising crud sometime in the late 90s, but has since been dying slowly ever since, and then was finally declared, triumphantly, dead just recently.

Bazil took the opportunity to Halloween-bash as well: “You dress up and knock on people’s doors and demand candy, otherwise you’ll vandalize their homes?”

Devon and I protested. That’s not how it is at all, we said. That’s what trick-or-treat literally means, but no one really means that. But there’s no denying it: houses get egged, trees TP’d, pumpkins smashed.

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Halloween, Nick says, really flies in the face of Polish tradition. In this deeply and thoroughly Catholic country, Halloween (which is nonexistent) comes on the eve of All Saints Day, when the country more or less shuts down to pay respects to deceased relatives — not parade around in costume begging for sweets.

Halloween, in this way, I think, has a great way of revealing what makes Americans different from much of the world. Adam Gopnik writes, in “Paris to the Moon”:

Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all, that like all American holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that everything, even death, ends with candy.

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“Only the British and Americans do this,” Noam, a Belgian, complained as we prepared to leave for a Halloween party.

Some of us had by then spent a good couple hours on costumes for a party in a bar near Stare Miasto. Noam was obviously grimacing at having to go through any effort at all just to gain entrance to a silly party.

In fact, when we finally got there, no one seemed to be dressed as anything, and he discreetly decostumed himself.

The party, thrown by a British girl, was not much of a party, though I can probably attribute this assessment to the fact that we had spent more time applying a gelatin that smelled like wet dog to our faces in preparation for the party than at the actual party.

Our group exited the bar, disbanded, and half of us headed off, drunk and indecisive, to a club somewhere else in Warsaw.

Here in our group, standing on the street somewhere not too far from Old Town, someone had acquired a pumpkin, probably from the bar’s front door decoration. It was tossed back and forth. Funny. Then it went flying — tossed by somebody, probably a slightly inebriated Brit — into the air, floating, simultaneously weightless and heavy with impact potential, then splat! all over the sidewalk of the Senatorska.

A smashed pumpkin, to finish our American Halloween in Warsaw.