So in the 1990s my mom left the occupied Dakota land where she was born, to live in Norway, the country of birth of her grand-to-great-great-grandparents. This means that I was raised bilingual in English and Norwegian, with two passports. By extent I have a fairly complicated relationship to nationality, and in particular to "American-ness".

And one example of this complicated relationship is with Halloween. Because I would've been born right around the time when Halloween was first starting to gain a foothold in Norway, right? So I got to basically witness firsthand, what was initially a tradition specific only to my and a few other US emigrants' families, meant to remind us of our family back in the occupation zones and basically just celebrate being born abroad... Become something celebrated nationally by children with no real familial connection to the holiday. Halloween went from something that I could share with people — something that I could invite my friends to celebrate as a unique experience — to something ubiquitous across basically the entire country.

On the one hand, I was glad that I could with time get more booty from trick-or-treating; my mom was glad that it was easier and easier to get decorations and pumpkins to carve... But on the other hand, I also kinda resented the popularization of Halloween in Norway. I resented how, as you say, marketing ghouls as well as media imported from America had managed to essentially airdrop an entire holiday into a new country. Norwegians even refer to the holiday by its English name, "Halloween" — so Halloween definitely has the vibe of something transplanted here for marketing purposes.

I mean, it's not the worst, because Halloween is a fun holiday. I understand why people want to celebrate it even without any real personal connection to it, and it's perfectly fine to do so; and Halloween also feels like a distinctly children-to-young-adult-oriented holiday, which means that celebrating it can still be a way for me to connect to youth culture, right?

But nevertheless, I guess my point with this is that even from a pretty young age, I had already grown to despise American cultural hegemony specifically because I was an American in Norway. I saw American cultural hegemony as simultaneously cheapening my own family's ways of celebrating our origins and relatives; as well as actively harming the culture of the country where we lived, all for the sake of profit. So I basically wanted Americans in Norway to be just another immigrant group, in the same way as Eritreans or Pakistanis or Lithuanians or Peruvians. The English language, as I saw it, should've been equal in status to Urdu and Polish; American media should've been equal in status to Russian and Chinese; American culture all the same. I'd say this is what sets me apart from a large portion of the anti-Halloween crowd in Norway, which in my experience is dominated by old, racist curmudgeons who don't want any sort of cultural exchange, whereas I have just always dreamed of cultural exchange without hierarchy.

...But at the same time, is my dream of American culture being equal to the cultures of other countries really possible, when American culture is itself a bit of an unnatural, new thing? Like, Halloween as I know it is only as old as my grandparents. It originated as essentially a marketing-bastardized appropriation of an Irish holiday. So mainstream (read: white) American culture is really just a series of appropriations put in a blender, flattening the actual diversity of the different immigrant communities in the United Occupation Zones — because this flattening of diversity is necessary for establishing and upholding the racist hierarchy that the entire nation is built on.

So... I guess that makes my feelings towards Halloween kinda hypocritical? Like, what is playing out in Norway right now is what already played out in North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Irish immigrants probably felt similarly about Samhain getting turned into mass-produced costumes, as I feel about the plastic tchotchkes flooding Norway's shopping centers today. I'm acting possessive over something that was never mine to begin with.

So what I do to commemorate my relatives living on occupied Dakota land kinda validates that selfsame occupation. It's fundamentally different from, like, Kurds celebrating Nowruz and stuff, and so it can't really be treated the same, can it? What my family does to celebrate our "heritage abroad" is really just commemorating, like, four generations of children who were born on stolen land, before one of them returned to where she really had her roots. So Halloween is really just... a souvenir of our family's brief time in North America. It isn't some sort of honorable tradition we've had for many generations.

Why is it so hard for me to just accept that? And why do I still feel some sense of pride from flying the Stars & Stripes, while I simultaneously never hesitate to say "Death to Amerikkka!"? Why do I find so much beauty in speaking and writing the language that was forced on my great-grandparents, while simultaneously decrying that language being similarly forced on my peers in the present?

...I dunno, isolation, propaganda, and privileged laziness, I guess.

Sorry for the ramble, sorry if this doesn't really make much sense, this is just stuff I've been chewing on for a while.