Halloween
During the week the “baseball kids” have been making plans for the weekend.
Sunday – October 31st, Halloween – seems to have caught their imagination. Katya, for example, is a member of a dance troupe and they had a show in one of the city’s youth centers, (but as I was in Naryn for my monthly visit to the guesthouse, I couldn’t go). She got her costume sorted out for the party that was to follow – she went as a vampire.
Sunday isn’t necessarily the best day for parties and discos – but as it happens, this week is what we in Britain call “half term”, so there is no school this week and so they could take the opportunity to relax and have a good time. For the adults that wanted to party some of the bars, discos and nightclubs ran special events on Saturday
Now, Halloween is a fairly new import to Kyrgyzstan – another example of the impact of the “global village” in which we live, today.
Here in Kyrgyzstan, they seem to have a wide variety of holidays from all over the world … There are Christian holidays, Muslim holidays, even a Zoroastrian Holiday, what could be called “Soviet” Holidays, and days to mark important moments in the history of Independent Kyrgyzstan. In addition to the official holidays there are a whole host of other occasions which are taken as an excuse for a celebration of some sort … and although Halloween hasn’t really caught on yet – it is seen as by many as just another excuse for “kids having high jinks”.
Halloween is really marked only amongst the ex-pat community (who may organize “Halloween Parties” – a former Head of the European Bank here in Bishkek used to organize a fairly big do and it was a major date in the ex-pat calendar), and members of the younger generation who have seen Halloween movies or children “Trick or Treating” in American films.
They don’t seem to have got the idea however, because when one group of kids knocked on the door of Stephen, one of my friends – another Brit expat here as a consultant on an EU project – they cried “Trick or Treat” and gave him some sweets and then ran off. Stephen gratefully devoured the sweets, … but he was somewhat confused – he thought he was supposed to give them sweets.
American films – and particularly Horror films – seem to be pretty popular here. Personally, I have never been that keen on them and always turn off Freddy Kruger, or similar, when they are shown on local TV – but the rows of CD’s lining the “Oozhious” (Horror) sections of the shops that sell CD’s and DVD’s are always fairly well stocked and they so to show a fairly high turnover.
During the week, I spoke to a number of people about Halloween, and their responses reminded me of the situation back in Britain a few years ago.
Although the origins of Halloween in ancient Celtic traditions, it was seen very much as an American holiday, and people weren’t too keen on this new “import”. I suppose that things like the lack of pumpkins in the UK didn’t help – and then we had our own “national” traditions for this time of year – such as “Bonfire night”. The idea of dressing kids up as witches and ghosts didn’t seem to take off as a very popular activity.
There are pumpkins here – but the idea of hollowing them out and carving faces in them hasn’t really caught on – at least, not yet.
It’s seems to be only here in Bishkek that Halloween has taken any real foothold. That could be partly because the local children’s channels on cable TV, (which are only really available here in Bishkek, and which seem to be mainly Russian based), have had a whole week of special programming leading up to Halloween – but mainly consisting of shows which are American imports. The local terrestrial channels seem to have shown virtually nothing on the theme. Perhaps that’s one reason why, when I asked about it in Naryn, I was greeted with blank faces – they knew nothing about the “holiday”.
But, then again, most of the Kyrgyz are basically Muslim and so it would have no meaning or connection for them for them. Although Orthodox Christmas is an official holiday here, for them it is just a day off work and the Russian community are the one’s who celebrate the holiday.
When I spoke to one person – a Russian and a devout member of the Orthodox Church – she was totally opposed to the holiday until I explained the history of the festival, and how it was connected with All Hallows Day when she started to soften in her attitude … they have a version of this day in Orthodoxy, and she felt it was good to mark this day – but, perhaps, not in this fashion.
For the record:
Because of the Association of Halloween with All Saints’ Day on November 1st, it is sometimes thought of as a Christian festival, however its roots go back much further and it is based on old Celtic customs, and in the modern world it is basically a secular celebration, even if it does draw on ancient mystical practices.
The Celtic festival of Samhain was a harvest festival held on October 31st, and is sometimes regarded as the equivalent of the Celtic New Year. The ancient Celts also thought of it as the time when the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and that the dead became dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivities to mark the occasion involved throwing the bones of slaughtered livestock into bonfires and wearing costumes and masks in an attempt to copy the evil spirits and placate them.
The word “Halloween” is an abbreviation of “All Hallows’ Evening”. In the Celtic calendar the day was considered to begin at sunset so All Hallows’ Evening was actually the start of All Hallows’ Day, which was a pagan festival celebrated in Northern European communities. It was in the ninth century the popes Gregory III and IV decided to move the equivalent Christian festival of All Saints Day from May 13th (which was also a pagan festival) to November 1st.
Bishkek