Hallo Venn

The way I know Halloween is the following: Mostly children and youths dress up in scary costumes like witches, skeletons and ghosts to stroll through the streets and ring at the doors, asking for sweets. And sometimes if you don’t do that people throw eggs and stuff against your walls or play other tricks on you. Already a couple of days before candle light flickers inside hollowed-out pumpkins, which are carved to look like a face and placed in front of doors. But that is Germany…

In Norway I only saw a carved pumpkin once – and that was in the supermarket where they have to promote Halloween. Nobody was ringing on doors either. Instead children and their parents met in the gym to celebrate “Hallo Venn”, which means “Hello friend” in English. We set up many stations to play and have fun together with other volunteers in the afternoon and looked after them till the evening. From a bouncy castle and trampoline over dexterity games to bowling and sack racing – everything was offered. While playing the children could collect sweets by succeeding in the different tasks. And obviously they dressed up in costumes, but not in that scary way (at least not entirely). It was more like carnival with many princesses (especially Elsa from the movie ‘Frozen’ was highly appreciated), Spiderman, little dinosaurs and elks (so sweet!!) as well as Pikachu. In the course of the evening an acrobatic group showed its performance and after 8:00 pm a kids disco took place while we tidied up. Luckily we had active support from Germany because I had visit. Tusen takk for hjelpen din Tim ;)

All in all it was a really nice evening and in my opinion a much better way of celebrating Halloween. But I guess in Germany it would not be possible because it is already too Americanized, still it is nice to see that it works for Norway. However the American tradition becomes more important in Norway too like Astrid told me – and like you can see it in the stores. I really hope that they can keep their own tradition alive for some more years.

Ha ein fin dag og ha det bra!

Alisa