There’s a delightful story by Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence, in last Saturday's New York Times, about how the French came to celebrate Halloween.
Here’s an excerpt:
There is a tendency among the French to welcome certain aspects of American life with immediate and uncritical enthusiasm: hamburgers, Jerry Lewis, baseball caps, elderly television series (“Starsky & Hutch” is still running on French TV), Westerns, Marlboro Lights, button-down shirts — these and much more besides have crossed the Atlantic to become firmly embedded in le lifestyle français.
The Celtic-by-way-of-America celebration of Halloween is one more example that has always stuck in my mind because it arrived in France about the same time that I did, 20 years ago.
I remember the moment well. I was passing the window of a shop that specialized in avant-garde underwear when my eye was caught by a small pumpkin, half-concealed behind the lacy thickets of a black brassiere. A hand-lettered sign tucked into the bra read, “N’oubliez pas l’alowine!” — as if one could ever forget Halloween when reminded of it in such an exotic fashion.
But there was a problem. In those unenlightened days, hardly anyone in France had the faintest idea of what alowine was.
Interest in Halloween is fading.
According to Halloween expert Jim Farrelly, Hallloween isn’t what it used to be. "I'm sure that kids will be instructed not to touch anybody as they go door-to-door and that hand-sanitizers will be used between stops. It's going to be a very clinical Halloween."
Demographics also play a role. In 2008, the number of children aged five to 14 sank to 3,807,039 — the lowest level since hitting 3,798,425 in 1990. For more on this, read this article from Canwest News Service.
Not surprisingly, spending on Halloween (in the U.S.) will likely drop this year. Consumers this year are expected to spend an average of $56.31 per person on Halloween, down from $66.54 in 2008, while total spending on the holiday is expected to reach $4.75 billion, according to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 2009 Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch.
For more data from this survey, click here.
Also, for more Canadian data on Halloween, have a look at Stats Can’s annual "Halloween by the numbers". You’ll learn about costume rental, pumpkin production, scary movies, coffins and caskets manufacturing, embalmers, candies, crime on Halloween night, and worshippers of Satan.
Quebeckers, ghosts and witches.
According to a survey conducted by Leger Marketing in 2001, 30.2% of Canadians believe in ghosts while only 20.9% of Quebeckers do so - the lowest level of all provinces. 15.2% of Canadians believe in witches. Almost one in four residents of B.C. (23.4%) do so while only 9% of Quebeckers do so – the lowest level of all provinces.
However, the same survey reveals that Quebeckers are more likely than Canadians in the rest of Canada to have attempted to communicate with the deceased.
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