Halloween

In 1953, when my husband, Kory, immigrated to America, he didn’t know anything about Halloween.  One night when his family was sitting around the table eating dinner, the doorbell rang.  Kory’s father, Halvor, got up from the table to answer the door.  He was greeted by a group of kids dressed as bums and other such unsavory characters, expectantly holding open bags out in front of them.  They said something to him in English he didn’t understand, and he responded to them in Norwegian something they didn’t understand.  He slammed the door shut and went back to his dinner.  After this scenario repeated a few more times, Halvor returned to the dinner table and sternly admonished his four boys that they should, “Never go around begging like that!”  The next day at school, Kory and his brothers found out what all the begging was about, and every year after that, they joyfully participated in this unusual American tradition.

Even now, Norway doesn’t really have Halloween, but the times, they are a changin’.  The prevalence of American media in their culture is messing with all kinds of things, and now after seeing it on TV, Norwegian children want to go trick-or-treating like American kids.  When we lived there, the newspapers all ran articles reminding people what Halloween was and that kids shouldn’t bother to go to homes where the porch light wasn’t on, as many Norwegians are adamantly against this “celebration.”

Our neighbor girl, Sabina, was counting down the days until she could go door to door and get a bag full of candy, but then was sorely disappointed when she and my son, Kaleb, discovered no one on our block was game. 

Kaleb was invited to a birthday party for a classmate just a few days prior to Halloween, so all the kids dressed up in a costume, much to their parent’s dismay.  One mother I talked to was worried about the affect Halloween would have on smaller children, since all the costumes available for purchase in Norway are quiet gruesome.  She thought children might become afraid of the dark if they saw some of these “creatures” walking around in the evening, or even worse, become terrified if they answered their door to such horrific looking faces.  I had to agree.

As the parents were picking up their kids after the birthday party, I overheard one mother say with a disgusting tone, “If we HAD to get a holiday from America, why couldn’t it have been Thanksgiving?”