Lost in transit

Happy Halloween

I live in a smallish Austrian village that started a few years ago to sort of celebrate Halloween. My youngest daughter, Gamma, is seven and a girlfriend stayed overnight on October 31^st. They dressed up as witches and it fell to me to accompany them on their trick-or-treating rounds, while my wife stayed home and distributed sweets (we had a basket full of various small candy bars) to hypothetical children stopping by our house.

We got an early start, hoping to beat the crowds. It was raining and nearly dark. I gave each girl a light of some sort to carry, for extra visibility. The rain was light, and I figured it would stop in a few minutes, so didn't bring any umbrellas.

We didn't go to our immediate neighbors, because they seem to be the tradional types and I thought that, at best, they would hide inside their darkened living rooms when the bell rang, and at worst yell at us for celebrating a non-Austrian holiday. Instead, we went a block up the street to my daughter's friend's aunt's house, for starters. There, the girls said, "Süßes, sonst gibt's Saueres" when the door was answered, which means more or less, "give us something sweet, otherwise we'll give you something sour." The uncle brought them into the house and looked around for something to give them while I waited outside in the rain. They got a box of chocolate bananas (not everyone prepares for Halloween in our village, with the result that kids sometimes get either way too much or nothing at all at such houses). They said thankyou and we headed off down another street, where I knew quite a few children to live, on the assumption that such families would be better prepared.

We went to the house of my daughter's teacher for the fun of it. In past years, her husband had always yelled at children for celebrating a non-Austrian, pagan holiday. He was pretty reliable about it, and my oldest daughter always made a point of going to the house for the fun of it and I thought we'd uphold that tradition. To our surprise, they were not home but had left a nice note on the front door inviting all the "Halloween children" to return for their sweets in a few days when they got back.

We batted about .450 on that street. Gamma and her friend had a full sack of sweets and we voted to quit and return home before we got pneumonia, because the rain was getting worse and worse and we were two soaked witches and a soaked man in black.

At home, they got a hot bath and my wife informed me that no one had been to our house yet. We watched a movie while the girls split up their candy upstairs. After a while the rain stopped and kids started to arrive. Just in time, too, because I was eating a candy bar each time I passed the basket and was starting to feel ill.

The kids were all in costume, pretty heavy on the witches and ghosts and vampires, as Halloween in Austria is considered to be the horror-movie-costume holiday, with all the other dress-up stuff saved for the Carneval season costume parties. The kids were split pretty evenly between the polite ones who said Thank-you, and those who just grabbed their sweets and ran. I suppose our doorbell rang about ten times that night.

Later, we found out that all the serious trick-or-treating action was in the new section of the village a few blocks away, populated almost exclusively by young families with little kids. We'll hit that next year.

The following day, our neighbor lady came by with two small bags of candy for my daughters, asking why they hadn't stopped by.

Posted by Mig at November 2, 2004 10:52 AM