I know it's celebrated in the USA, Canada, Ireland and Scotland and is creeping into the rest of the English speaking world. But, how far does this go? Brazil? India? France? South Africa? ~String
Well it as a holiday was from paganism, it's actually suprising that it didn't get creamed by religious indoctrination like the other pagan holiday during the winter season (you know the one that got recalled "Christmas") Obviously the renaming of various holidays is attributed to Roman occupation of "pagan" lands, since during their occupation Christianity was spread. To my knowledge, I believe that they reasoned that trying to keep many provinces happy with their different deities was proving too difficult so attempted to force the world to one religion, slowly turning other lesser religions to that particular religion. (Obviously it didn't work because those religions just resplintered arguing about which way up to eat a boiled egg) Another point of course is "Mass Marketing" and "Capitalism", I mean why only make a small amount of money from producing some novelity pumpkin's for a couple of countries that are going to purchase it.... no, no it won't do in Capitalism, There are entire untapped markets needing this "novelity pumpkin" so you end up with a False economy being made through advertising to sell snow to eskimo's.
In East Korea, every day is like Halloween. But that's only because people run around in scary costumes, terrifying the hell out of passers-by.
Halloween is pretty big in Japan, surprisingly enough. Apparently they just decided that it sounded like fun, and got on board with it. About the only difference is that they're a lot less likely to dress up like scary things. They usually go for characters from video games and animes.
