The influence of US media on European culture can be seen in many places. A good recent example, besides people getting fatter and fatter, is Halloween. All Saints’ Day, the first of November, is an old Christian holiday. This could be a reason why Halloween, an utterly clownish event, has been pushed so hard by US soft power. For adult women, Halloween is an excuse to dress sluttier than usual, and engage in typical modern female behavior. On the other hand, kids go from house to house, begging for sweets.
In my neck of the woods, kids also walk from door to door to ask for sweets. As we do not have any sweets at home, there is nothing I could give those kids, but there is another reason why I am not particularly interested in buying a few sweets just to give to kids in the area. The first one is that due to shifts in society, there is hardly anything left of a sense of community, in the village of about 1,000 people I live in. I do not even recognize the children that walk around on Halloween.
If I lived in a homogeneous environment, I would not be opposed to buying a bag of nuts or perhaps even some sweets for the kids in the neighborhood for Halloween. However, a surprisingly large number of kids around here are the offspring of cultural enrichers. There are some landlords in the area who rent entire apartment buildings to the government. (Thanks, faggots!) Thus, my taxes pay for the food, shelter, clothes, and the very generous financial support of those people. A family of four, for instance, gets their rent completely covered and about 2,000 Euros on top. This is more than many families with two income earners have left. On top, the idea of those kids going around, demanding bags of sweets is just bizarre. They already get showered in taxpayer money, so the least they can do is buy their own sweets.
You can also tell where those immigrant children went as they left trails of candy wrappers. In a house in the neighborhood, one of the oldest ones and seemingly a remodeled old and large farmhouse, someone clumsily sprayed a penis. This may be a complete coincidence, but I do not really believe in coincidences anymore. Well, perhaps the kids did not get as many sweets as they thought they deserved, so I suppose this was a perfectly fair reaction. It is part and parcel of living in a diverse society. Perhaps I should start thinking about getting a dog.
You actually have some local traditions around Halloween – for example st Martin’s day or Räbenlichter in German speaking countries. Of course with the spread of Halloween those local traditions are getting less important as they are getting replaced with Halloween.
St. Martin’s is on 11 November. This tradition is certainly disappearing. When I was a kid, we had a long procession with all children of the village. Today, there are more children than before, but many of them from a different cultural background. There is also, as a consequence, much less social cohesion. Some kindergartens still celebrate St. Martins and it is basically a get-together for parents, with more parents than children in attendance, due to the prevalence of families with only one child.