Today is Halloween, but there are no candles flickering in our jack-o-lantern, and we aren’t concerned that we forgot to get candy for the trick-or-treaters. Instead, it was a pretty uneventful day. My feeling of Halloween nostalgia has hit me somewhat unexpectedly. In thinking about holidays we’d miss this year, I didn’t think of Halloween, but this has been the first year in I don’t know how long that we haven’t carved a pumpkin, dressed up, celebrated with friends, or (more importantly) helped Oscar and Calvin to do these things.
Halloween is about spookiness in the U.S., but it is a pretty tongue-in-cheek, commercial spookiness. Here, there’s a little more seriousness about the supernatural, and to the few people who have asked us whether we celebrate Halloween, we’ve been hard pressed to explain: “Yes, it’s about ghosts and people dress up like scary things and decorate their houses with scary things, but we don’t really believe in it” (which seems strange for the inordinate amount of time and energy we put into the holiday). “Yes, we do cut up pumpkins and put them out and they rot, but they look really pretty and it’s fun to do and they’re not food pumpkins like the pumpkins here.” It’s just hard to translate on an island where there have been real-life highly publicized cases of albinos being killed for use in medicines, where people have been killed in recent memory under suspicion of being “Popobawa” (a Zanzibari version of a vampire), and where entire schools have been closed because of epidemics of “shetani” (ghosts) invading girls’ bodies. The supernatural is no laughing matter here, either for the people who believe, or for the people who are concerned about the effects on the living. And no one here would waste a whole pumpkin on a decoration.
So it’s been a pretty subdued Halloween this year. Today, while Brady and I were puttering around and doing weekend cleaning projects, the boys got inventive and created their own very small haunted house with some boxes. Boo!
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