This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Worth mentioning that in Japan, New Years is a holiday period with particular religious observances. Some traditions like celebrating everyone's birthday on New Years have fallen out of favour, but you still perform particular rites on New Years in regards to people who have passed away in the preceding year.

On New Years, all the shops are closed. Christmas is not a public holiday in Japan; New Years is the "western" equivalent for the winter holiday where family annually gathers.

Japan does Halloween the way it does other Western holidays, which is in a manner that is hecka quaint. All the grocery stores and 100 yen shops I've been in have a section for Halloween decorations. We don't do Trick or Treat, but expat communities will have costume parties.


New Zealand observes Christmas, New Years, New Years' Holiday, Cup and Show Weekends which vary from region to region, the Queen's Birthday, Easter Weekend, and Waitangi+ANZAC Days (our history's equivalents to America's Independence Day and Veterans' Day).

Boxing Day is also a public holiday, unless you're in retail. In which case it's the fuckoff busiest day of the year (or tied with Christmas Eve). New Years will also be busy if you're in hospitality. Major cities put on an event of some description, bars are open, and if you're not down for those you go party at friends'/family's.



@ Supes: It isn't, though, is my perception of it? When I think of Halloween, sure, I think costumes and sweets, but the concept of it being an American celebration is very engrained in my perception of it. Because the majority of New Zealand television/music/film/books are imported from the USA, as a kid I saw Halloween on TV and other serialised works and the aforementioned stuff really appealed to me. How could it not?

There was always a reluctance with my parents to let me and my sisters go out trick-or-treating - not because I lived in a dangerous neighbourhood or had particularly odious neighbours, but because we lacked the cultural justification to traipse onto people's property and ask for stuff. Sure, we could do that and nobody could really grumble because 'tis the season or whatever, but it's a piece of alien cultural identity which especially failed to mesh with my parents' culture and upbringing.

On the contrary, the holiday would stress me out because I could see my parents getting stressed out by my younger sisters' badgering for treats and costumes and the chance to go trick or treating. It stopped being fun for my parents, and that's about when it stopped being a mystical spooky celebration for me as well.

I've, like, got photos from when I was one or so, and me and my parents were living in New York. There's one of me in a stroller in a pumpkin outfit, so it's not like my parents were always against Halloween full stop. They just didn't feel it appropriate to go shoehorning a culture they had no connection to into an inappropriate context. They wanted my sisters to be proud of and represent their own culture(s), not the ones being romanticised by American TV. Those two gave up on learning Japanese not long into primary school, so the TV/books they absorbed were pretty exclusively American fare (unlike me, who read the Japanese equivalent of Captain Underpants and- and in retrospect this seems really fucking crucial -I absorbed most of my general knowledge through educational manga like these).

If I ever end up Stateside in a late October? Hell yeah I'm putting a costume together. I'm even attending a costume party at the end of this month. On the other hand, Halloween is by historic association a stressful time of year for me, and makes it very easy for me to feel cynical about American culture creep.