Halloween

I used to feel confident on Halloween. The weekend before we’d have prepared, carved our pumpkin, laid in supplies of candy, and perfected the costumes. On Halloween night itself, I would know to take the kids out after quite an early dinner and before night fall. We would go with friends and wander from house to house, knowing that the better the Halloween decorations, the better the candy was likely to be. We knew not to stay out too late or else the big kids in really scary costumes would show up. We knew to allow an extra 45 minutes for the post-trick-or-treating obligatory sorting and trading of candy (slightly longer for Naomi, who would also make a written inventory of her candy to protect against culling mothers) . Halloween 2007, kiwi style, was not that kind of event.

First of all, in the places I’ve lived before, Halloween is about the crunch of leaves under your feet, the crisp bite of air that might make your mom insist on a jacket over your princess dress. Not here. Here it’s a spring event, with blooming flowers and late-glowing sun. Because of this (maybe?), there are no decorations, no jack-o-lanterns. A friend told us she had carved her first pumpkin and was anxious because she had put the lid back on it and left it burning. Will it burn down the house? she asked us knowledgeable Americans. No way, we explained, assuring her that we left the pumpkins lit on our front stoop each year. Hers were lit inside the house though, she told us. We glanced nervously at each other and were less reassuring. We’ve never thought of a pumpkin burning inside the house.

The kids were confused too sometimes. Little AG, MG’s daughter, who turned out to be the best part of fun. The daughter of an American mother, AG has always lived in New Zealand—all her life until now in the far north, in a place where Halloween isn’t celebrated at all. So it came to be that she was six and experiencing the glories of Halloween for the first time. While my children were bemoaning the relatively low key, small scale of this Halloween, AG was reveling in it. Or at least she was once she got the hang of it.

At first we had to explain it all. So there was the question about whether costumes could be pretty or just had to be scary (we thought probably both were ok, which was good news because she was lovely). Then there was the whole trick-or-treating conversation, which went something like:

“What is trick-or-treating?”

It’s when you go to someone’s house and they give you candy?

Why do they do that?

Because it’s Halloween.

But why do they give you candy on Halloween?

Because that’s what happens on Halloween.

But WHY does that happen?

And so on, going ahead each time until we ran out of answers, which sometimes happened rather quickly (why DO we do this??).

Then the first trick-or-treater came to our house and Aidan grabbed the candy bowl and ran out to the gate to give it out. I stood surprised as the father of the little fairy princess actually did a trick—a juggling routine—and then cheerfully accepted the candy from Aidan. AG, who had run out with her bag, skipping cheerfully up the path, came back dejected. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

”It’s not fair at all!” she said, pouty-faced. “He took three pieces of candy from us and didn’t give us anything back!” More descriptions of the way things worked on Halloween. Those didn’t fully take either. Walking up the hill, candy bags painstakenly chosen and decorated, AG stopped short in her tracks. “Oh no!” she cried, “we have to go back! We forgot all the candy at home!” Aidan looked at me, the most mature and knowing expression on his six-year old face (or maybe it was the mustache), “She really doesn’t understand this thing!” he said.

There were others who didn’t understand Halloween either. There were prepared families, with chocolates in bowls just like at home. They had candy wrapped in little bars, just like I’m used to. The most adventurous families even had “gummy body parts” so that children could eat the stray nose or ear. But then there were some folks who looked surprised to see small children in lovely dresses (Naomi and our friend AG) and weird wigs (Aidan). And those families punted and gave bags of chips destined for their own children’s lunch box, lose candy (here called “lollies”), and even the odd gold coin here (Mommy-we got TWO dollars!!).

Surrounded by all these folks new to Halloween, we lost all of our own knowledge about the thing. We forgot to carve a pumpkin (here pumpkin is a food item and not a decorative item). We had no idea which houses to visit. Some houses have signs that say “no Halloween.” One had a helpful sign that said “Halloween here.” We wandered along, a little pack of Americans in fancy dress, through this rumply magnificent village, over dunes covered with houses, through backyard veggie patches, under flowering cherry trees. Occasionally we’d come upon little packs of New Zealand ghosts and princesses and super heroes. And then we went back to our house, the kids trick-or-treated from us (thus damaging AG’s sense of what Halloween was about). And we tucked our candy-filled children into their beds just as the springtime sun was sinking into the Tasman Sea. Just another Halloween night in New Zealand.