Lithuanians don't naturally have a Halloween. Technically, we should go visit the graves on Vėlinės on the 2nd, but the 1st - All Saints - is a day off as well and people use that for the same reason.

I probably could tell you more if I was a better Catholic.

What we don't have is dressing as ghouls, goblins or supernatural monsters (Tzarist Russians?) and get fucked up beforehand. Tricking-and-treating is also out of the question.

However, American culture reaches all via ghlo-bah-lee-zation. Kids want to dress up and get candy because they've seen it on TV, pubs and bars want one more day for people to get fucked up on, people want to get fucked up (and dress up, maybe), etc. So Halloween is worming its way into the public sphere.

One of our foster kids went trick-or-treating with her friends. Had skull face paint. Got candy (and apples, and a few tangerines). Had a lot of fun.

However, some people are mad about this. There are roughly too camps: the nationalist fun-haters who don't want to see a non-Lithuanian tradition take root and the clerical side which insists that Halloween isn't just fun and games because anytime you draw a skull, you're worshipping death or something.

Both of these camps are fairly boring and will be brushed to the side by the world hegemony and the desire to dress as a skelly.

We do have a similar trick-or-treating tradition during Užgavėnės (literally "Time before Lent"), which is our Mardi Gras et al. The difference is that kids are mostly supposed to dress in traditional costumes... which often means parodying minorities like the Roma! Very few people ever saw issue with that, but the blackfacing is on the way out, sort of like the tradition itself.

I guess the reason for that is that Užgavėnės was never culturally a reason to get fucked up in an office party!

Oh, and like half of all Lithuanian celebrations, it's pagan as fuck, including burning of a straw woman to show that we kicked the winter's ass

There were two kids who kept whispering during the classroom trivia game.

I think they might've been in kahoots!

Games Workshop unleashed a new website that unified their store fronts, ditching a fairly settled system that was decent for navigating all the plastic garbage you wanted to buy,

I hate this.

Anyway, someone take a look and tell me whether I'm just Mad That Thing Change