DRD Team

Looks like this will be coming in handy again soon


For me, English, I don't celebrate Halloween and just sit in my house whilst a few (usally about 2) kids knock on the door as I pretend i'm not in!


Oh and I'll be watching a Halloween 1 - 8 marathon Michael Myers!

im probably gonna put on some face paint and pass candy out at my girlfriends house. im not expecting to do anything out of the ordinary except screw with some of the poeple passing by.

Even as an American I'm not entirely sure what Halloween is about (and I'll be 30 before you know it), but I think it's fun to dress up, drink some alcohol while pretending to be "something else" and scaring each other. I used to work at Mike Greenwell's park (I doubt anyone knows who that is, but my manager was his brother), and had to run haunted hike shit in the park. And dude, we made it SCARY, even our security guard (we were only like 17 at the time) would get in on it and fuck with the people, but it was all in good fun. It was in the spirit. Halloween! I don't know other countries parts of Halloween, but I wouldn't lose it for the world, even when I have kids I'll be taking them trick or treating and having our house set up scary as hell. It's just a fun excuse to be kids for a while I guess. Well.. kids that drink alcohol and scare the shit out of everyone else.

Oh, and give other kids candy of course.

SoulPriestess wrote:pumpkin carving

That's another example of the increased americanisation of Halloween here. Not so long ago, you wouldn't have people carving pumpkins at all. I don't think I'd ever even seen a pumpkin "in the flesh" until I was into my 20s. Nowadays, in the run up to Halloween, you can't move in the supermarkets for piles of pumpkins. Most places didn't make any kind of lanterns that I am aware of but around here it used to be the done thing to steal a turnip from a farmer's field and hollow it out to make a lantern. Believe me, hollowing out a turnip is much harder than a pumpkin.

For 5 years straight, I've had to work on Halloween night, and I'm not happy - this year included. Normally, I wouldn't have even had to come in on Haloween, but this year they had something special planned and they HAD to pull me in.

Anyway, normally, I'd dress up in a wraith costume or something, wouldn't do anything too major. I remember doing the pumpkin carving thing as a kid, and trick or treating, but never did it after age 11 because as soon as I hit middle school my grades started plummeting, and parent-teacher conferences were always RIGHT before Halloween - so the teacher could tell my parents how messed up my grades were and I'd be grounded. Then when I started improving, I was too old for it anyway.

There was a recent attempt (mostly by supermarket chains) to import American-style Halloween around here. It flopped, so they dropped it almost entirely after a couple years.

Halloween has been celebrated in the UK for hundreds of years (indeed, it is the celtic new year - Samhain) and, sure, as a kid I did do the house-to-house thing as well. However, it just doesn't seem to be as big a deal here as it is in the US. We don't, for example, generally have "Halloween Specials" of long-running TV shows and 2what are you doing for Halloween" simply isn't a question that tends to crop up very often. People may go to a themed night at a club or something but they'd probably be going to that club anyway.

It has become more Americanised in recent years though. eg, when I was a kid, I only knew the term "Trick or Treat" because my neighbour was an American and she told us about it - and expected us (my sister and I) to trick-or-treat her. I remember finding out about it as a cool piece of information that I was one of the few people at school who knew. Nowadays, the kids are unaware that it was ever called anything else (around here it used to be called "guising").

In my country Halloween is only starting to get some popularity and only within the ranks of kids. I won't be going out in some costume myself (I think I'm gettin old for this) but most likely will buy some treats for youngsters who'd stumble upon my humble abode.

I must admit, I don't really get the whole American Halloween thing. I'll probably not be doing very much at all.

I'm getting into character as a private eye. Trenchcoat, fedora, internal monologue, the works. Hell, I'm even trying to put together a noir-ish soundtrack that I'll probably have playing from my pocket. Heh - having your own soundtrack following you around. =P

lmao nice. uhm... is that where your screen name comes from? if not thats an interesting coincidence lol

I think I might find an old flannel shirt, stuff some newspaper in the sleeves, put a bag with a crazy face over my head and sit very still on the porch like a dummy until the little kids and their mommies arrive, then jump up and yell RAWWWR and scare the shit out of them.

Never gets old. ;p

If this is a repeat topic sorry.

If I don't go to a costume party with my boys, I'm just gonna dress like a pirate or something and hand out candy drinking a bit (see: a lot) with my neighbor. I'm toying with the idea of playing "scary" synth music from the garage with my MIDI keyboard, but I don't have the talent or lack of stage-fright my brothers have. If I get drunk enough before hand I may still go a long with it, and my neighbor can hand out the candy. Also, I'm worried about noise ordinance laws.

At any rate, what are you guys doing?