#i took the bus to the Big City and there's halloween stuff everywhere and i'm like old woman yells at cloud

[hedgehog-moss]

When I’m an old lady I’ll still be informing young people that Halloween never existed in this country until the 90s /early 00s when people who sell us stuff realised they could use it to sell us more stuff, and Halloween-themed stuff suddenly appeared in shopping centres without warning and was relentlessly marketed to children, and adults saw right through it and disliked it (“what’s this American sh*t, why are there pumpkins and witches in shop windows this never used to be a thing”) until they got used to it and young generations grew up thinking Halloween had always been a thing here even though kids born just a decade earlier had to be taught about it by the TV or school. Also it trampled over our pre-existing Fun Cultural Event When Kids Get Dressed-Up which had never needed to be marketed so aggressively and therefore became less relevant

I don’t mind at all if you love Halloween but it’s so weird to see my younger cousins convinced that it was always a thing in France when I remember being taught at school what trick or treating was, like “let’s learn about cultural traditions that are exotic and fun and different from ours!!” and I’m not old. Millennials literally saw Halloween get astroturfed into our culture with no explanation when shopping centres just went “from now on this is something we’ve always done” and we had no choice but to be like well OK I guess 🤷‍♀️

#i took the bus to the Big City and there's halloween stuff everywhere and i'm like old woman yells at cloud #it's not a Bad cultural import it's just... the calculated cynicism of it all. and having watched it happen live #and the homogenisation of cultures #when i tell my cousins how recent it is it kind of blows their minds #if an older cousin had told me when i was 10 that she had to be taught what christmas was in school i would have been befuddled too