Cotton spider webs and dancing plastic skeletons lined the walls of the only Halloween store within 10 blocks of my Berlin apartment.
Six customers wandered around the store, but I was the youngest by at least two decades. After 19 years of American Halloween ““ full of costumes, trick-or-treating, jack-o-lanterns ““ my 20th is looking a little underwhelming.
Today will be a normal day for Berliners ““ wake up, go to work, eat dinner, head to bed. No decorations to set up, lights to turn on or kids asking for candy.
That’s not to say there’s nothing going on here in Berlin. Posters for clubs, free drinks and pub crawls are plastered across subway stations, apartment buildings and throughout school campuses.
There is even a Halloween party organized by my university’s international program.
But there’s no community effort like I am used to in America. No pumpkin patches or five pound bags of Wonka candy in the stores, which have already moved on to Christmas.
Brianna Miner, a fourth-year chemistry student at UC Santa Barbara, said she is a little disappointed with the Berliner Halloween. With a reputation as one of the biggest party scenes in Europe, both of us expected the city to capitalize on any excuse to celebrate.
“I wish I could go back to (Isla Vista) for just a day,” she said. “It’s a big deal at home, but here it’s nothing.”
Miner said her mom used to ask her in July what she wanted to be for Halloween. This year she didn’t even have a costume.
Most of the international students I talked to said Halloween is more of an excuse to drink on a weeknight than celebrate with ghouls and ghosts.
“In Spain, we drink like always ““ just in costume,” said Hipólito Fortes Lucena, an economics and business administration student from Spain.
A lot of cultures don’t even recognize the holiday. For Frédérique Dell, a Belgian student at Humboldt University in Germany, Halloween is considered a “new and really American” holiday, and is considered exclusively for children, when it is celebrated at all.
Halloween is thought to originate from a combination of pagan traditions and Christian holidays and was brought to America by Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s. Oct. 31 was originally called “All Hallow’s Eve” and precedes All Saints Day, an important religious holiday that dates back to the 400s.
Students from Lithuania, Spain, Germany and France all talked about how people ““ now mainly older generations ““ spend the first day of November placing candles and flowers in cemeteries to honor and remember the dead.
“People say that Halloween is a pagan festival, so they don’t celebrate it,” said Augustin Lezor, a student from France.
The one time Lezor did go trick-or-treating, his parents did not want him to go, and the only people who gave out candy were close friends, he said.
In Germany, many common American traditions have yet to reach the general public. Case in point, my roommates Stefan Krzepek and Christian Kroll have never carved a pumpkin.
I once drew a Jack-o-Lantern face on a gourd from the Turkish market down the street from my apartment, and Krzepek was not only confused, but concerned. We were eating the pumpkin for dinner.
Bruin reporter Elizabeth Case is living in Berlin, Germany, reporting on life abroad while taking classes at Humboldt-Universität. This biweekly column is a collection of tips and insights from a student traveler. Email Case at ecase@media.ucla.edu and follow her on Twitter,
@elizabeth_case.