Over the last perhaps five years there has been a concerted effort by retailers to import the celebration of Halloween into Australia. "Happy Halloween" go the advertising banners in the supermarkets, which always struck me as terribly inappropriate: Happy Halloween? Shouldn't it be Scary Halloween or Spooky Halloween or some such?
As a fully paid-up member of The Left, my first reaction to this trend was naturally to denigrate it; partially on the basis of "Bloody Seppos trying to take us over" and partially because it was obviously entirely motivated by the desire to sell yet more lame junk to the public.
However, I thought about it a little more.
Currently, the major celebrations of the year; Christmas and Easter are already a) Utterly inappropriate to the country and b) Completely commercialised beyond any hope of redemption.
Christmas derived from a pagan winter solstice celebration and Easter from spring-time fertility rites. Wicker Man stuff that was uneasily incorporated into the Christian tradition as it overwhelmed other cultures.
Easter has now morphed into a celebration of gluttony. I mean, a few Catholics go to church and stuff, but the majority of people just gorge themselves to the point of sickness on chocolate.
Christmas, in turn, has become a horrible orgy of consumption. The worst, most ill-tempered behavior you'll see all year is in Christmas shopping crowds. And, seriously, Santas with fur-lined boots and hats in an Australian summer! And reindeer and snowmen!
So my argument is that if you're going to celebrate stupid, inappropriate, occasions for no rational reason, you might as well at least choose a celebration that's cool and fun.
Halloween is fun. It's not restricted to a narrow range of conventional behavior, but gives the opportunity to be creative. You can dress up in an almost infinite variety of ways. You can stick a Tony Abbott head on a pike in your front yard, and people won't look at you like you're crazy, but say admiringly "Wow! That's a really gross zombie head!"
So, open your mind a bit. Just because it's American, doesn't mean that it's inherently bad.
