Thoughts about Halloween

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The roses have wilted, the violets are dead.

Ghosts running circles inside your head. 

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Finnish people don't really celebrate halloween, but shops and the internet are always trying to make us.

Despite disliking the over-americanizing of our culture, I always love dressing up as a vampire on halloween (that's really the only costume I've ever had since I was eight years old and experienced my first halloween in Sweden) and going trick or treating.

But in Finland trick or treating isn't even a thing. Sometimes the neighbor's kid would come asking for candy, but that was really it.

Here you also can't dress up as a non-scary video game character or a sexy nurse or that would be really weird. Witches, ghosts and monsters are kinda ok though. "Fine, you can pretend to be american and celebrate halloween, but if you aren't scary-looking, then go to a cosplay event, dude" is what they'd say.

It's like in Mean girls when Lindsay Lohan goes as a scary bride and everybody looks at her weird. But it's the complete opposite here.

In Finland we have All Saints Day (even though most people aren't even Catholic. It's just a tradition now) instead of Halloween. The cemeteries get filled with thousands of candles and everyone spend time with their loved ones, thinking about their loved ones on the other side.

Many of the elderly don't like halloween at all because it's considered offensive to the dead to celebrate their day. I respect that, but I also would love to be celebrated when I'm dead, so...  I honestly prefer All Saints Day that to an american halloween though, because it's such an old, special tradition for me.

We celebrate Christmas in a very similar way in Finland and I love it. We really love going to cemeteries, don't we?

I've never carved a pumpkin before so I thought I might do that this year in addition to my annual shadow play at church, which has now become a little halloween tradition of mine, yay!

And I'll of course put my fangs in my mouth and scare little children while I'm wandering around the graveyard.

Where are you from? Do you do anything special on Halloween?