this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Halloween has been celebrated in the UK and Ireland for hundreds of years, and the Irish brought it to America.
There has been dressing up and going door to door for hundreds of years too, and even jack o lanterns have been around for ages.
The holiday is much more a UK thing than it is an American thing, it's rather surprising actually that it's not as much a thing in Australia...
Oh please. Nobody of sound mind actually believes that the Hallowe'en celebrated in America, that some corporations are trying to make a thing here too, has anything more than a passing resemblance to the traditional Celtic practices it's based upon.
The Halloween celebrated in the UK is literally just kids getting dressed up and going door to door for free candy. They have been doing that in the UK for hundreds of years before the US started doing it when Irish immigrants brought it over.
This isn't some whacky theory dude, it's fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick-or-treating#Guising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween
No one is saying the modern Halloween is meant to be a Celtic tradition, it's just a bit of fun.
It's also probably the least commercialized holiday as well. You buy some candy and put the porch light on, or don't and leave the porch light off.
Get a costume, or throw something together, grab a pillowcase and off you go.
It's a far cry from Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, etc. which are far more commercialized worldwide.
Christmas and Valentine's Day both have sincere secular associations to them, and Christmas and Easter both have a pretty hefty religious component for a sizeable minority of the population. Hallowe'en is literally nothing but commercialism. Buy a plastic shitty costume. Buy lots of lollies (sorry: "candy", for the Americans lecturing the rest of the world about how it's totally not American cultural imperialism) at marked-up prices, and decorate your house with yet more plastic crap. But without themes of family and connectiveness to act as a redeeming factor.
Except kids can make their own costumes and decorations. The best ones tend to be home made.
For many its just a fun time to embrace the macabre.
Halloween’s sincere, secular association is FUN. It’s also about community; it’s the only holiday that actually involves getting together and participating with your neighbors rather than just your family. Under capitalism, all holidays involve a deluge of cheap plastic crap, but at least Halloween sticks to its season.
It's also one of the few nights of the year where entire neighbourhoods get together, meet each other. Families get dressed, make costumes, go door to door.
We set up tables and chairs on our front porch here in Brisbane, and have tacos or pizza while we watch Halloween movies and wait for trick or treaters.
We hang out with parents, hand out bottles of water, some candy, and I prefer giving out some useful treats like themed pencils, erasers, this year we gave out stickers for potion bottles, so when kids get home they can clean out an old jar and make cool potions to decorate for next year.
It is the only time a year when we see all of our neighbours and I would say it is the one holiday we all feel most connected.