‘Some parents decided to drive their, already not very slim, children from door to door in the SUV’

Source: Own image

It is clear that the Americans are a global supreme power. It is no secret that they want to emphasize this (where were you without McDonalds, Oreos and Taylor Swift? Nowhere!) And it is therefore hardly surprising that the election period, also in South Africa, fuels the daily news.

However, that is not what I want to waste the roughly 500 words of this column on. I simply don’t write for a political opinion magazine. What I do want to talk about is how the great influence of American celebrations and customs is spreading around the world at an ever increasing pace.

Nobody had a baby shower in the ’90s

30 years ago, no one outside America had heard of a baby shower or a gender reveal party. Not a single mother accepted a diaper cake with unadulterated joy or blasted a confetti cannon with pink glitter into the backyard.

Celebrating Halloween in South Africa

The same goes for Halloween. In my youth this was mainly something that existed in American films and series. In the Netherlands you dressed up at carnival (below the rivers) or at a crazy thematic costume party. Nowadays, Halloween is celebrated annually in the Netherlands by almost half the population, and a cautious attempt is also being made in Cape Town. So we dug out our horror costumes and gave it a try.

A significant difference between Halloween in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres is the month of October. While October is the month of early autumn, dark days and balding trees for Americans (and Dutch), in South Africa it is completely the other way around. October is the month of approaching spring, fragrant flowers, hay fever and hours of sunshine. In terms of Halloween feeling, you could say that South Africa starts with a 1-0 deficit.

Sunny Halloween

So we put a creepy, but not too hot, suit on our children after first applying factor 50 to them. Our eldest son’s make-up started to drip after 10 minutes. Doesn’t matter, he thought too, it looked nice and grisly. The participating houses were characterized by decorations. No hollowed-out pumpkins (too much work? Nobody wants pumpkin soup in the spring?), but pumpkin flags and paper skeletons.

If you want candy, you have to move

However, the decorated houses turned out to be in a strong minority, so that after their obligatory ‘trick or treat’ (‘why doesn’t anyone do a ‘trick’, mom? I have no idea child’) our sons were able to trot five minutes further in their hot suit to another front door. Quite tiring, you could say. And at the same time a good motivator; anyone who wants candy has to move. However, that was a line of thought that not everyone understood.

Some parents decided to drive their, already not very slim, children from door to door in the SUV. Yes, there is another decorated house. Dad puts on the brakes, quickly opens the doors, fills the basket and turns on the air conditioning again. Really. Is this what Halloween is supposed to be like?

Has the American ‘drive through’ culture also blown along with all the northeasterly winds? You could rather label ‘Trick or treat’ as ‘Trick and cheat’, or ‘Drive and eat’. We gave up after half a basket filled with chemically fluorescent colored candy. Our sons were done with it, so were we. Just drop by McDonalds then.

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