Halló, og Gleðilega hrekkjavöku!
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(That’s “Happy Halloween” in Icelandic, though “hrekkjavaka” [the nominative form of hrekkjavöku] literally means “a wake where someone inflicts mischief on someone else.”)
This is a fairly new holiday here in Iceland, one that has really only taken hold in the last five years. Sure, we were aware of Halloween and what it was all about, and various marketing agencies tried for years to make us adopt it so they could sell us pumpkins and other paraphernalia, but nope! it just didn’t take.
Probably this was because we had our very own version-ish of Halloween, namely Öskudagur (Ash Wednesday), where kids get dressed up in costumes and traipse around doing tricks for treats. The main difference being that they do so during the day, not in the evening, and they do their candy soliciting from shops and businesses, not from private homes.
Also, it is totally lacking the spooky, creepy, ghostly stuff of Halloween.
But then suddenly everything changed.
It feels like it happened from one year to the next—though realistically it was likely in the space of five years or so. Suddenly Icelanders were ALL-IN. Throwing parties, carving pumpkins, decorating, getting decked out in costumes … the whole nine yards. Granted, we haven’t yet reached the point where every home has candy on offer for trick-or-treaters, but I suspect it’s just a matter of time. At least it does not escape anyone’s attention any more that it is Hrekkjavaka.
I’m inclined to put this change down to the influx of foreign citizens settling in Iceland, though that’s just a homegrown theory and not supported by any research. In the last five years alone, the number of foreign citizens who have settled in Iceland has risen by nearly 28,000 people, and they are now around 18 percent of the population.
While some folks grumble about these newfangled “American”1 holidays making inroads here and steamrolling our traditions (which they are not, they are simply adding to them), my feeling is that most people welcome this fun distraction from the encroaching darkness of winter. Besides, I’ve never known the Icelandic people to pass on an opportunity to throw a party.
What’s Halloween like in your part of the world? Let me know in the comments.
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Which it is not, of course, since Halloween was originally a Gaelic festival
When I was a kid growing up in the 70s in New York, we used to trick or treat on both All Hallows' Eve and Halloween night - different neighborhoods, of course. To this day, I've never met anyone outside of my hometown who trick or treated the night before Halloween. Now we live in rural Maine and they do Trunk or Treat, where adults bring their cars to a big parking lot and line them up, like you would see in a car show, and decorate the trunk spaces of the cars. The kids go from car to car trick or treating. I understand it's because of being so rural, but still...there's nothing like going house to house!
You are in a position to do Halloween better than Americans. At least I hope so. You don't poison the treats or put razor blades in them. It's warm and cozy Halloween in your part of the world, like when I was growing up here.