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Stop pretending Halloween is a thing in Europe
(hexbear.net)
Tired of all this pumpkin and plastic skeleton crap everywhere. Thanks, marketing ghouls 
What, are we going to start celebrating the 4th of July next? Might as well with the NATO membership I guess
In Communist Europe fireworks are literally illegal except on New Year's Eve
In amerikkka fireworks are banned on a state by state basis so we just go to whichever neighboring state hasn't banned them and buy all the illegal fireworks we want
If you can buy fireworks whenever, how are there still American kids and teens left with eyes and fingers
Most places don't sell to kids
You gotta find an uncle or other suitable patsy to get them for you
It's actually mostly a county basis I think. They're legal in the US in like 49 states with only like 10 or so even having major restrictions. But in the county I live in, just for example, they're completely banned.
Obviously, when you only have to go to a neighboring county to buy the banned thing, it's not really much of a ban.
Except they have started to sell them for the middle class for the end of cottage season party now too. Which also did not exist before, not even ten years ago.
Btw. we did have our own pagan version of Halloween, a harvest festival called Kekri in Finland. Also there is another very Halloween like celebration still persists that came from Demmark during christian times. It's on January 13th and is still celebrated in the archipelago. I was lucky enough to grow up participating in that well before the Amerikkkan halloween was a thing here. We did all the costumes and things with going from house to house to sign songs and get candy.
Isn't Kekri specifically more of a Karelian/Eastern Finnish tradition and less of a thing in the more Swedish-influenced Western and coastal regions?
Guess I'm not middle class enough to have ever heard of that cottage fireworks shit, I'm sure wildlife appreciates it
I had no idea about this new firework day either until I saw the seller stalls this autumn and heard the fireworks from the suburb nearby. They have been consumerisming the venetsialaiset thing (did not even exist like a decade ago) so hard.
Kekri was an ancient deity, looks like a Karelian one so this too might be a part of the way we have culturally appropriated Karelian beliefs. Or might be this was a thing everywhere, but the custom has survived best in the Karelian region. It has apparently been also politicized by Maalaisliitto at one point. But it is very much like Samhain, even has the same beliefs of a kind of liminal space from harvest to when a new cycle begins with the dead walking the earth and ancester spirits being restless. Pretty cool.