When I was growing up in Argentina, Halloween wasn't really a thing down there. Like, we were vaguely aware of it because all of the cartoons and movies we watched were from the US. But nobody celebrated it.
My parents sent me and my siblings to English school after regular school, so that we would "have a future", which I'm not going to unpack in this post. It was there that an enthusiastic teacher explained what Halloween was and how people celebrated and I was furious. You mean to tell me there is a holiday where kids get to dress up, wander around at night and they get candy about it? And we don't have it?? Seven-year-old me learned about injustice that day.
So for the first and last time in my ADHD life, I set myself a long term goal and worked consistently to achieve it.
I rallied my siblings, who were as furious as I was, and we decided we would make Halloween happen the next year. We recruited some neighbor kids that also knew of Halloween and we started spreading the word among the other kids. We lived in a huge apartment complex, so we had access to some 250 families (and potential candy givers).
We spent the better part of the year convincing our parents Halloween was not only good, it was also cool and necessary even. Closer to the date, we made posters by hand letting people know they would get ghoulish visitors on All Hallows Eve and they should be ready to appease us with candy.
The night of, I dressed up like a cute witch and we set out to knock on doors. Results were mixed but encouraging. The general attitude from the grownups was confusion. Most people had nothing, some had bought candy specifically to give out, but we did knock on some interesting doors:
- lady that had no candy but had just made a coffee cake earlier that day and insisted we take the entire thing
- Old lady that accused us of being devil worshippers and closed the door on us
- Man that explained "we don't do that here, this isn't "Yankee land", so maybe go observe some local customs, you turncoats"
- woman that had no candy but have us a 2 liter bottle of soda "for the party" we explained there was no party but she said we should have one to show off our costumes
- our own door, answered by my mom who had dressed up as a skeleton ghoul type thing and spooked all the kids in our group, but then gave out good candy, so word got around and for the rest of the night she could hear kids daring each other to knock on the door and died laughing about it
- some guy who gave us potato chips for the party we were apparently having now
By the end of the night, we got together on the green space outside the buildings (remember, this is the Southern hemisphere so Oct. 31st was a warm spring night) and exchanged candy and stories while eating the cake and chips and drinking the soda (all from the bottle, we had no cups)
The next year I was too mature and grown up to be a cute witch so I dressed up as a scary witch. People were less confused then and we got SO much candy. Kept doing it every year until I was too old and then it sort of fell off. Kids stopped doing it, I don't know if they've started again.
This is a microblogvember post! Here's the list of prompts if you want to participate
