Do They Celebrate Halloween? A Country-by-Country Look at 20 Places

Ask ten countries whether they celebrate Halloween and you get ten different answers, and most of them start with “sort of.”

That is not evasion. October 31 means something different depending on what the local calendar already holds. In Scotland the night has been marked for centuries without any help from America. In France it arrived in the late 1990s with a retail campaign behind it and then lost most of its floor space within a decade. In Seoul it was an adult nightlife event and then, after 2022, something more complicated. In Manila it is a mall promotion sitting on top of a far older obligation to return home for the dead.

So this guide answers the question twenty times, and answers it in local terms. For each place you get three things: whether the night is actually observed, what the historical reason is, and what people eat, wear and do. Where a country has its own Halloween-adjacent festival, that gets the space it deserves, because in most of the world that festival is the real story and Halloween is the newer, smaller arrival beside it.

One warning before the list. Halloween’s global spread followed television, English schools and shopping malls rather than migration or missionaries. That pattern explains the whole map. If you want to know whether a country celebrates Halloween, look at what its schools teach, what its malls sell and what its young adults do on a Friday. Religion turns out to be a weaker predictor than the retail calendar.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in the UK

Yes, and the people who ask this usually have it backwards. Halloween in Britain is not an American import. It is the older holiday that America reshaped and then sent back.

Halloween was never an import

The night has been marked in Britain and Ireland for centuries, and the name itself is British. Hallow means saint, and All Hallows’ Eve is the evening before All Saints’ Day on November 1. Carved lanterns, soul cakes and door-to-door visiting are all documented in these islands long before anything resembling them existed in North America. Irish and Scottish migrants carried the customs west in the nineteenth century, and the version that came back in the twentieth century had been through an American filter: bigger, sweeter, and organized around the porch instead of the doorstep performance. The direction of travel runs east to west and then back again.

How trick-or-treating arrived so late

The doorbell version is recent. Through the 1970s, British children who wanted a treat still dressed up and did something to earn it. Mass trick-or-treating only took hold in the 1980s and 1990s, helped by imported films and television and by the spread of the same supermarket candy aisles that exist today. It also had to compete. Guy Fawkes Night on November 5 brings bonfires, fireworks and public displays, and in much of England it remains the bigger event of the two. A country with a fireworks festival in the first week of November has less need for a doorstep one at the end of October.

Soul cakes, toffee apples and the English version

Soul cakes are the historic food, small spiced buns once handed to singers who went from door to door offering prayers for the dead. Toffee apples are the surviving street food of the season, and supermarkets sell far more pumpkin than any household actually cooks. Children’s costumes are mostly imported designs, which is why a British street at the end of October now looks similar to an American one even though the night underneath it is older and was never theirs to borrow. Adults have taken to fancy dress as well, and office parties and pub nights in the cities have become a reliable feature of the week.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in France

Partly, and less each decade. France is the clearest case in the world of a Halloween boom that ran out of momentum.

Why Halloween arrived late and then shrank

The French version is recent. It built through the late 1990s, pushed by retailers, American films and Disneyland Paris, which sits close enough to the capital to shape national habits. By the early 2000s, supermarkets were running full Halloween aisles and the night was being described in the press as a coming American import. The collapse was just as fast. By the middle of that decade the seasonal displays had shrunk to a shelf or two, and French commentators had started treating Halloween as a marketing idea rather than a festival. Critics, including some Catholic voices, had argued all along that it was a commercial import with nothing underneath it. In several ways they were right.

All Saints’ Day and the chrysanthemum rule

France already had November 1 off. La Toussaint is a public holiday, and November 2, the Day of the Dead, follows with its own observances. French families visit cemeteries and place pots of chrysanthemums on graves. That detail matters more than it looks. Chrysanthemums are the flower of the dead in France, which is why a French host will look at a gift of chrysanthemums the way an American host would look at a gift of lilies. Any holiday arriving in late October has to make room for a national week of remembrance, and Halloween never made much room for itself.

What a French Halloween looks like now

It survives in specific places rather than at large. Bars and clubs in Paris and other big cities run Halloween nights, and young adults in costume are a normal sight in the Marais and around Bastille. English-language schools use it as a classroom lesson, which is why French children can explain trick-or-treating without ever having done it. Expat neighborhoods keep the doorbell version alive. Supermarkets stock imported candy and a few pumpkins, mostly for soup. If you spend October 31 in a French residential building, expect an ordinary evening. If you spend it in a bar in the eleventh arrondissement, expect a party that could be anywhere in Europe.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Germany

Yes, and it is growing, but the date was already occupied. October 31 in Germany is Reformation Day before it is anything else.

How Halloween reached Germany and where it stuck

German Halloween is a post-1990 phenomenon. It came in through American film and television, and it took hold among young adults in cities first. That order matters, because Germany already had a costume season, and a loud one. Karneval in the Rhineland and Fasching in Bavaria fill February with fancy dress, so the demand for a second costume night was never obvious. Halloween filled a different slot instead: parties for adults, mall promotions, and a light version for children in neighborhoods where a few families decide to join in.

The holiday that already owned October 31

Reformation Day marks Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517, and it falls on the same date as Halloween. In several states it is a public holiday, including Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. Four more northern states, Hamburg, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, added it in 2018. In those places October 31 is a day off work, and the reason on the calendar has nothing to do with pumpkins. That does not stop the evening, but it does mean German Halloween sits on top of a date the country already had plans for.

Rübengeister, Kürbissuppe and the costume question

The German answer to the jack-o’-lantern sometimes goes back to the older root. In parts of the country children carve turnips and beets into Rübengeister, or root-vegetable ghosts, which is the same idea the Irish brought to North America before pumpkins replaced turnips. Pumpkin soup has become the reliable dish of the season, and bakeries put out seasonal sweets. Costumes are imported designs, sold in the same drugstore chains that stock Christmas goods from September. Children who do go door to door use a German phrase, “Süßes oder Saures,” though plenty of households simply leave the porch dark.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Korea

Partly, and mostly without children. Halloween in South Korea is a nightlife event rather than a neighborhood one, and it has changed shape since 2022.

Why Korean Halloween grew up as an adult night

Korea has no door-to-door trick-or-treat custom, and the reasons are structural rather than religious. Most families live in apartment complexes with controlled entry, and knocking on a stranger’s door is not a normal social act. So Halloween never arrived as a children’s ritual. It came in through clubs, bars and English-language education from the 1990s onward, and it settled in two Seoul districts. Itaewon, next to the old American military base, had been the city’s international quarter for decades. Hongdae, built around the university belt, supplied the students and the music. By the 2010s, October 31 in Seoul meant costumes, long queues and crowded streets, with almost nobody under eighteen involved.

What changed after October 29, 2022

On that night, a crowd surge in a narrow alley in Itaewon killed 159 people, most of them in their twenties, in the deadliest crowd disaster in modern Korean history. The country spent months arguing about crowd management and responsibility. Celebrations were curtailed the following year, and the large spontaneous street gatherings that had defined the night gave way to ticketed events and venue-based parties with capacity limits. Theme parks and hotels now run scheduled Halloween seasons, clubs operate with tighter controls, and the police publish crowd plans in advance. The night still happens. It simply moved indoors, and it carries weight that it did not carry before.

Costumes, food and Korea’s own candy holiday

Costumes follow global trends, with group outfits popular because Korean nightlife is a social activity rather than a solo one. There is no traditional Halloween dish. Cafes and convenience stores do the seasonal work instead, selling dark-colored drinks, themed pastries and limited-edition packaging for a few weeks. Korea also has a homegrown November candy holiday that does much of what Halloween does elsewhere. Pepero Day on November 11 involves giving boxed chocolate sticks to friends and coworkers. It began as a snack company’s marketing idea in the 1990s and turned into something people genuinely observe. Anyone studying how commercial calendar holidays take root in Korea is better off looking at that date than at October 31.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Thailand

Yes in the malls and the bars, and barely at all on residential streets. Thailand’s version is a commercial layer sitting on top of a country that already has several nights for the dead.

Where Halloween actually shows up

Bangkok does Halloween properly, in the commercial sense of the word. Malls in the Siam and Sukhumvit areas run campaigns through October with decorations, photo booths and promotions. Bars and clubs in Silom Soi 4, on RCA and around Khao San Road hold costume nights, and the crowd mixes Thai twenty-somethings, tourists and long-stay expats. Theme parks put on Halloween events, and international schools treat the holiday as a classroom project. What you will not find in most Thai neighborhoods is children working a street after dark. Gated housing estates, warm evenings and the absence of any inherited custom all work against it.

Phi Ta Khon and Sat Thai, the older Thai nights

Thailand has its own festivals for the dead, and they are older and stranger than Halloween. Phi Ta Khon is the ghost festival of Dan Sai in Loei province, part of a merit-making celebration called Bun Luang that usually falls in June or July. Participants wear tall, brightly painted masks assembled from sticky rice steamers and coconut husks, then parade through the town. Sat Thai, near the end of Buddhist Lent in September or October, is the quieter one. Families make merit for relatives who have died, and in some regions they prepare krayasat, a sweet of sticky rice, sesame, peanuts and sugar wrapped in banana leaf, to offer to monks and to the spirits being honored. Both customs long predate any contact with American popular culture.

What Thai celebrants wear and eat

Costume shops around Khao San Road do a strong October trade, and local popular culture supplies the best theme. Thai cinema has a deep ghost tradition, so dressing as a phi, a spirit out of local folklore, is an obvious choice and a common one. Seasonal food is mostly Western: themed cocktails, imported candy, cakes from hotel promotions. The traditional sweets belong to Sat Thai and to Chinese-Thai ancestor rites, when families burn paper offerings and set out food for the dead. Halloween in Bangkok is best understood as one more themed night in a city that runs on themed nights.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Canada

Yes, and thoroughly. Canada treats October 31 as a full national holiday in practice, second only to Christmas in retail terms, with one structural difference from the United States that changes the whole autumn.

How the Canadian version differs from the American one

Canada celebrates Halloween widely, but it splits the season differently. Canadian Thanksgiving lands on the second Monday of October, roughly three weeks before Halloween. In the United States, Thanksgiving sits at the end of November, so pumpkins carry two holidays in a row. In Canada the pumpkin is finished in early October, pumpkin pie is a Thanksgiving dish, and Halloween arrives on its own. The other difference is the climate. In much of the country, late October temperatures make a costume impractical on its own, so the standard Canadian look is a costume worn over a snowsuit or a coat, with the visible layer doing all the work.

Halloween apples and the UNICEF box

Canadian door-to-door practice has regional vocabulary. In parts of the Prairies, children traditionally called out “Halloween apples” rather than “trick or treat,” a phrase that survived in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta long after it faded elsewhere. For decades, Canadian children also carried a small orange UNICEF collection box alongside the candy bag, turning the night into a fundraising round. That practice has faded with the decline of cash, but it shaped several generations’ idea of what the evening was for. Safety habits are similar to the American ones: a flashlight, a reflective strip, and someone checking the bag at home.

What goes in the bag and what people wear

The Canadian candy mix is not the American one. Pineapple-flavored marshmallow lumps, chocolate-covered caramel bars, peanut butter chews and small chocolate fish show up frequently, and households that hand out apples or toothbrushes are remembered for years. Decorations follow American styles closely, since the television and film supply is shared. Houses in older neighborhoods in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver go further than most American suburbs, partly because the housing stock gives them a porch or a staircase to work with. Quebec uses the French term, l’Halloween, and in Montreal the costume shops and the street decorations have their own local flavor. If you want a rough rule, Canadian Halloween looks American to an outsider and Canadian to anyone who grew up in it.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in London

Differently from anywhere else in Britain, and much more like a night out than a night on the doorstep. London has a huge Halloween market and very little trick-or-treating.

Why London’s Halloween looks nothing like a suburb’s

The obstacle is architecture and traffic. Most Londoners live in flats, often behind a street door with an entry phone, so there is no porch to light and no path to walk up. Main roads stay busy into the evening, and schools and councils in several boroughs have advised against children calling at houses they do not know. What fills the gap is organized entertainment. Halloween at the Tower of London, ghost walks through the old City, late-night museum events, cinema screenings and club nights make late October one of the busiest weeks of the year for London venues. The London Dungeon, open all year, effectively has a season.

Bonfire Night, five days later

London’s autumn has its own fireworks festival, and it is old. Guy Fawkes Night on November 5 marks the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, and it is celebrated with bonfires and large public fireworks displays at places such as Alexandra Palace and Battersea Park. In most London social calendars, November 5 outdraws October 31. That leaves Halloween as the warm-up: a party night that feeds into a bigger, more locally rooted event a few days behind it. Anyone comparing British and American Halloween usually misses this. The American autumn has no second night competing for the same attention.

Where to eat, drink and buy a costume

Halloween in London is a hospitality event. Bars and restaurants run themed menus, street food markets take on the look of the season, and pumpkin desserts appear on dessert lists rather than in kitchens at home. Costumes come from a small number of well-known shops, including Angels Fancy Dress, which has been fitting out Londoners since the nineteenth century, and from the online end of the market. Because the city is so international, the crowd at a London Halloween party is not a British crowd. American, Australian, Irish and European residents all bring their own version of the night, which is why the London version feels more like a big city import than a national tradition.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in New Zealand

Yes, in the suburbs, in daylight, with a seasonal mismatch nobody can fix. New Zealand celebrates Halloween in spring.

Spring, sunlight and the seasonal mismatch

October 31 falls in the middle of the New Zealand spring. Daylight saving starts in late September, so it stays light until roughly eight in the evening. Children go out in daylight, and the whole visual package does not fit: no autumn leaves, no frost, gardens full of new growth. Pumpkins exist because they are grown and imported for the purpose, but nothing about the surroundings says late harvest. This is the clearest illustration of how much of Halloween is imported symbolism rather than local agriculture. New Zealand adopted the practice and kept the imagery anyway.

Guy Fawkes and the local competition

New Zealand has a second fireworks night, and it is the older one. Guy Fawkes Night on November 5 arrived with British settlers and stayed, and in many towns the public fireworks display still draws a bigger crowd than anything on October 31. Halloween grew later, mostly from the 1990s onward, through schools, television and retail, and it is a suburban practice rather than a national one. Rural areas often skip it entirely, partly because houses sit too far apart. Matariki, the Māori new year, has been a public holiday since 2022 and has no connection to Halloween at all, which is worth remembering when the night is described as though it belongs to everyone.

Lollies, costumes and a warm evening

New Zealand calls candy lollies, and the local selection is distinctive. Pineapple lumps, chocolate fish, jaffas and hokey pokey all turn up in bags, alongside imported chocolate. Spring weather means costumes are often worn over shorts rather than coats, and children typically head out with a parent in the early evening and are home well before dark. Police and neighborhood groups publish the usual advice about lit houses and supervised routes. Some schools discourage the practice as too American, and some households put a sign on the gate. The result is uneven. One street might be busy, the next silent.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Scotland

Yes, and this is where the night came from. Scotland is not an importer of Halloween. It is one of the two places the holiday was built, along with Ireland.

Where the night actually comes from

The Gaelic festival of Samhain marked the end of harvest and the start of winter, and the night before November 1 was understood as a moment when the boundary between the living and the otherworld thinned. In Scottish Gaelic, Halloween is Oidhche Shamhna, and the practice is documented for centuries before anything resembling it appeared in North America. When migrants carried the customs west in the nineteenth century, they took the name, the lantern and the door-to-door practice with them. Anyone who calls the night an American invention has the direction of travel backwards.

Guising, and why Scottish children perform

The Scottish door-to-door custom is called guising, and the arrangement is not a demand. A child who knocks is expected to earn the treat with a turn: a song, a joke, a poem or a short recitation. In some parts of the country the traditional request was “please help the Halloween party,” which is a very different sentence from “trick or treat.” The older treats were apples, nuts, oranges and coins rather than chocolate, and the custom was a neighborhood affair rather than a commercial one. Guising survived the American takeover of October because it is a performance and a performance cannot be replaced by a slogan.

Neep lanterns, apple dookin and the Scottish table

The original lantern was carved from a neep, the Scottish word for a swede or rutabaga. Hollowing one out is hard work and the inside smells strongly when a candle is lit, which is part of why the pumpkin won when the tradition crossed the Atlantic. Apple dookin is the local name for bobbing apples, and fortune telling games were once the centre of the evening: nuts were burned in pairs to test a couple’s prospects, and kale stalks were pulled to reveal a future spouse. On the table, the historic Halloween dish is champ, mashed potatoes mixed with milk and chives, sometimes with a ring or a coin hidden inside for whoever found it. Neeps, tatties and a bowl of water for the apples. Very little of it came from a supermarket aisle.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Russia

Yes, in clubs and among the young, and with formal disapproval attached. Russia’s Halloween is a post-Soviet import, and the Orthodox Church has been clear about not wanting it.

How Halloween arrived after 1991

The holiday arrived with the cultural opening that followed the end of the Soviet Union. American films, music television, English-language schools and a new nightclub industry all arrived within a few years of each other, and Halloween travelled with them. By the 2000s it was a regular feature of urban youth culture in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and by the 2010s it was a marketing date as much as a celebration: bars ran themed nights, brands sponsored costume parties, and shopping centers put up decorations in October. The center of gravity has always been adults rather than children. Russian residential life, with its apartment blocks and intercom doors, does not support door-to-door visiting any more than Seoul’s does.

Why the Orthodox Church objects

The Russian Orthodox Church has been critical for two decades. Patriarch Alexy II publicly warned against the holiday in the 2000s, describing it as importing darkness into a culture that already had its own traditions, and church spokespeople have repeatedly framed it as foreign and as encouragement for interest in the occult. That position has practical consequences. Several regions have issued guidance against marking it in schools, and individual school administrations have restricted or banned Halloween parties. The stated concerns are threefold: that it promotes occult practice, that it displaces Russian traditions, and that it puts children in contact with imagery the church considers spiritually harmful.

What Russians already have instead

Russia has its own calendar of thin nights and fire nights, and they are on different dates. Svyatki, the twelve days between Orthodox Christmas and Epiphany, was the traditional season for fortune telling, particularly among young women asking about marriage. Kolyada, the carol singing of the same period, worked like souling: groups went from house to house, performed, and received food. Kupala Night in July had fire jumping, water rituals and wreaths floated to predict the future. Maslenitsa ends winter with pancakes and bonfires. So the components of a Halloween exist. They simply belong to January, March and July, and the church would prefer they stay there.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Albania

Barely, and not for religious reasons. Albania’s answer to the question is mostly a story about which century the country spent the twentieth in.

Why Halloween skipped Albania

Albania was one of the most closed societies in Europe between 1944 and 1991, and organized religion was itself prohibited from 1967. When the country opened, its cultural imports came overwhelmingly through Italian television, which arrived in Albanian living rooms before anything else did. Italy, however, had a weak and contested Halloween of its own, so the version Albania received was faint. Later imports followed the same route. The result is a place where Halloween is known as an idea rather than observed as a night. Religion does play a part, since Albania is majority Muslim with Orthodox and Catholic minorities, but the historical sequence explains more.

Dita e Verës and the festivals Albania does keep

Albania has a busy calendar; Halloween simply is not on it. Dita e Verës, Summer Day, falls on March 14 and is a public holiday rooted in older spring rituals. It is celebrated most famously in Elbasan with ballokume, a cornmeal and butter cookie made for the day, and with bonfires. Nowruz on March 22 is another public holiday. Nata e Shën Gjergjit, the night of Saint George, still involves fire rituals in some areas. In the Catholic north, All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2 are observed properly, with families visiting graves and lighting candles. Those two dates do the work that Halloween does elsewhere, and they are older.

Where you will find it, if you look

Halloween exists in Albania for a narrow group. International schools in Tirana run costume days for their students, and their families often keep the American practice at home. Shopping centers and hotels use the imagery for October promotions, and bars in the capital hold themed nights that draw a mostly young, urban, English-speaking crowd. For most Albanians, October 31 is an ordinary autumn day, and the observances that matter come two days later. If you are visiting and want to see the local version of the season, go to a cemetery on November 1 rather than a party the night before.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Paris

Less than you would guess from a tourism calendar, and in a shape the city’s buildings dictate. Paris has Europe’s largest Halloween operation and almost no trick-or-treating.

Disneyland Paris and the mall Halloween

The largest Halloween production in Europe is a thirty-minute train ride from the city. Disneyland Paris runs a Halloween season from early October, with decorations, character parades and a separately ticketed evening event, and it sets the standard for what French families with young children think the holiday looks like. Inside the city, the commercial version lives in retail: department stores dress their windows, malls run promotions, and chain bakeries put out seasonal pastries. That is the whole of the mainstream French Halloween in Paris. It is a shopping and leisure phenomenon with a seasonal theme rather than a neighborhood custom.

Why Parisian apartment buildings rule out the doorbell

The practice could not survive the architecture even if anyone wanted it. A Parisian residential building has a coded street door, an intercom, often a caretaker, and no porch or front path. There is no equivalent of the American lit porch, and there is no way for a child to signal that a household is participating. On top of that, most neighborhoods have far more apartments than houses, so the number of doors worth knocking on is small. Building rules and the city’s traffic finish the argument. In Paris, Halloween is something you go to, not something you walk around.

The Paris Halloween you can actually attend

What the city offers instead is organized. Clubs in the Marais and around Pigalle run Halloween nights, and costume is expected rather than optional. The Catacombs, open all year, does its heaviest business in late October. Cinemas and film institutions program horror retrospectives, and themed walking tours sell out through the month. Then, two days later, the local observance arrives: on November 1, Parisian cemeteries fill with chrysanthemums for Toussaint, and Père-Lachaise draws families all day. That contrast is the honest picture of the season in Paris. A party on the thirty-first, and a much older obligation on the first.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in China

Commercially yes, residentially almost never, and the older Chinese night for the dead falls on a different month entirely.

How Halloween entered Chinese cities

Halloween reached mainland China as a shopping and entertainment product rather than a folk custom. Theme parks made the first move, with Shanghai Disney and the domestic parks building Halloween seasons into October, and shopping malls followed with decorations and promotions. English-language training centers and international schools then brought the classroom version, costume parties included. Nothing pushed it toward residential streets, and the housing pattern explains why. Most urban families live in gated compounds or apartment towers with controlled entry, where a stranger at the door is a security question rather than a greeting. Halloween in China is something you buy a ticket to.

The Chinese festival that already handles the dead

China has its own observance for the unsettled dead, and it is older and more serious. The Zhongyuan Festival, often called the Ghost Festival, falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, usually in August. Families make offerings and burn joss paper for ancestors whose spirits are thought to be visiting, and the mood is cautious rather than festive. Qingming, in early April, is the other one: tomb sweeping, food carried to graves, and a public holiday attached. Between them, China has two well-established days for honoring the dead, one in spring and one in late summer. October 31 is not one of them.

Cosplay, street gatherings and what people eat

The most Chinese element of the imported holiday is what people wear. China has a deep costume culture through anime conventions and the hanfu movement, and that energy attached itself to Halloween in the last few years. In 2023, young adults in Shanghai turned out in elaborate costumes on streets in the former French concession area, drawing crowds big enough to make international news. The city has since limited large unplanned gatherings in those areas for crowd safety reasons, and the scene shifted toward paid venues. Food has no local tradition attached. What sells instead is pumpkin-flavored drinks, themed cakes and limited-edition packaging from the big coffee chains. Ghost-themed merchandise follows the same rule as everything else in Chinese retail: it appears for six weeks and then disappears.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Sweden

Yes, but Sweden already had a door-to-door candy day, and it is at Easter. That single fact explains most of what Swedish Halloween looks like.

All Saints’ Day, candles and the Swedish cemetery

Sweden’s November observance is quiet and old. Alla helgons dag, All Saints’ Day, is observed on the Saturday that falls between October 31 and November 6, rather than being fixed to November 1, and the central practice is lighting candles at family graves. On that evening, Swedish cemeteries fill with small points of light, and families travel to visit the plots they are responsible for. It is a sombre occasion and it takes precedence over anything commercial. Anyone visiting Sweden in early November and expecting Halloween decorations should go to a cemetery instead, because that is where the population has gone.

Why Easter is Sweden’s costume holiday

Sweden has a children’s costume tradition, and it happens in spring. At Easter, children dress as påskkärringar, Easter hags, with headscarves, freckled cheeks and a coffee pot, and go door to door handing over a drawing or a card in exchange for candy. The figure comes from the old folklore of witches flying to Blåkulla at Easter, which is why the costume is a witch and why the holiday is Easter. For an American reading this, the implication is straightforward. Sweden already had the thing Halloween is famous for, and it had it on a better date for children, in daylight, in the middle of a public holiday weekend.

Halloween in the shops and at home

Halloween itself became visible in Sweden in the 2000s, driven by television, retail and amusement parks. Liseberg in Gothenburg runs the country’s largest Halloween event and has done for years, with actors, haunted houses and evening opening hours, and it functions as the national version of the American front porch. At home, the Swedish contribution to the holiday is candy. Pick-and-mix walls, known locally as lösgodis, are a national institution, and October reliably lifts the sales. Costumes are imported designs, bought for parties rather than for walking a street. Valborg, the bonfire night of April 30, already does the fire side of the season, which leaves October 31 free to be mostly a party for teenagers and a shop window for everyone else.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Brazil

Partly, and the two halves are easy to tell apart. Brazil has a commercial Halloween driven by schools, and a much older Day of the Dead that belongs to everyone.

Dia das Bruxas and where it happens

Brazilians call it Dia das Bruxas, Witches’ Day, and the main vector has never been the neighborhood. It came through English-language schools. Chain schools around the country built Halloween parties into their lesson plans decades ago, using the holiday to teach vocabulary about costumes, candy and pumpkins, and millions of Brazilian children met the tradition that way rather than through their parents. International schools and bilingual programs did the same. From there it spread to shopping malls, bars and private parties, and it is strongest in São Paulo and Rio among middle-class and wealthier urban young people. What it is not is a rural practice or a working-class one. Halloween in Brazil arrived with an English lesson attached.

Dia do Saci and the pushback

The cultural resistance has an official face. In 2003, a federal law put the Saci on the October 31 calendar, creating Dia do Saci as a national counterweight to the imported holiday. The Saci is the one-legged trickster of Brazilian folklore, a boy in a red cap who smokes a pipe, whirls in dust devils and plays pranks, popularized in the twentieth century by the children’s books of Monteiro Lobato. The idea behind the date is to give schools and families a Brazilian figure to celebrate on the same night, and it has been adopted unevenly. Some municipalities and schools take it seriously, others ignore it, and the imported version keeps growing.

Finados, and what Brazilians actually do

The days that matter come immediately afterward. November 1 is Todos os Santos and November 2 is Finados, and both are national holidays. On Finados, families go to cemeteries, clean graves, leave flowers and candles, and attend Mass. It is one of the busiest travel weekends of the Brazilian year, because people return to the towns where their families are buried. Party food at a Brazilian Halloween means brigadeiros, themed cupcakes and whatever the bar is serving. The food of the season belongs to the cemetery, where families leave flowers and light candles. If you want to understand how Brazil handles the dead, watch November 2 rather than October 31.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Spain

Yes in the cities, but Spain has two local answers to October 31 that are older and, in their own regions, more important.

La Castanyada, the Catalan answer

Catalonia marks October 31 with a chestnut festival rather than a costume night. La Castanyada is built around castanyes, roasted chestnuts sold from street carts, along with panellets, small almond and pine nut sweets often made with sweet potato or quince, and moniatos, roasted sweet potatoes. The image of the season is the castanyera, an older woman in a headscarf roasting chestnuts on a corner. The occasion is a family meal rather than a night out, and Catalan schools and parents argue every year about whether to add Halloween to it, replace it, or ignore the imported version entirely. In much of Catalonia the answer has been to do both, which is why October 31 in Barcelona can include a chestnut cart and a witch costume on the same block.

Samaín in Galicia and the Celtic claim

Galicia has made a different argument. Samaín, the Galician spelling of the Gaelic festival, was revived from the 1990s as a local, Celtic-rooted alternative to the American holiday. Celebrations in towns such as Cedeira involve carved pumpkins, processions and story telling, and the tradition fits the region’s own folklore about the Santa Compaña, a ghostly procession of the dead said to walk rural roads at night. Galicia has a genuine cultural claim to a late October festival, and the revival is not a marketing exercise. It is a deliberate attempt to give the region its own version instead of an imported one.

What Spanish Halloween looks like now

The commercial holiday is strongest in Madrid and Barcelona and among urban families with children in bilingual schools. Private English academies run Halloween parties, malls decorate, and bars and clubs in both cities hold costume nights that draw large crowds. The neighborhood version exists in pockets but is not a national habit. Spain’s own season, meanwhile, is on November 1 and 2, when families visit cemeteries, and the sweets of the period are distinctly Spanish: huesos de santo, marzipan rolls shaped like bones, and buñuelos, fried dough eaten with chocolate. That combination, an imported party on the thirty-first and a native observance on the first, is now the standard Spanish arrangement.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in the Netherlands

In the expat districts and the shops, yes. In Dutch neighborhoods, the children are carrying lanterns three weeks later instead.

Sint-Maarten, the Dutch door-to-door night

The Netherlands has its own children’s begging night, and it is not in October. Sint-Maarten falls on November 11: children make paper lanterns at school, walk the neighborhood in the early evening carrying them, sing a short song at each door, and receive candy in return. The lantern parade is the point. It is a communal, supervised, earlier-in-the-evening version of the same interaction Halloween produces, and it is strongest in the north and east. In the Randstad it has weakened, and this is where the two holidays meet. Dutch newspapers have reported for years that Halloween is replacing Sint-Maarten in Amsterdam and Utrecht, making the Netherlands one of the few countries where the American holiday is visibly displacing a local one.

Why Halloween stays in the expat lane

Amsterdam and The Hague have large international communities, and Halloween in those cities belongs to them, along with the international schools and the bars that cater to an English-speaking crowd. Dutch retail supports the holiday because it is profitable, and chain stores sell costumes and decorations from early October. The resistance is not ideological. It is calendrical. The Dutch autumn is crowded: Sint-Maarten on November 11, then Sinterklaas in early December, then Christmas. There is not much room left, and Halloween has settled into the gap between the end of summer and the start of the sinterklaas season. The Catholic south, in Brabant and Limburg, also keeps its own observances on November 1 and 2, when families visit graves.

Costumes, candy and an ordinary October

Dutch Halloween takes place at parties rather than at doors. Adults go to themed nights in city bars, children dress up for school events if their school runs one, and a few streets in expat-heavy neighborhoods organize trick-or-treating by arrangement rather than by chance. Candy sales rise, in a country that already eats a great deal of it. What you will not find is a national habit. Ask a Dutch parent what their children do in the dark with candy, and the answer is more likely to be November 11 with a lantern than October 31 with a plastic mask.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in the Philippines

Yes, but the imported night is a warm-up for something much bigger. In the Philippines, the main event is Undas, and it lasts two days.

Undas, and why October 31 is only the preamble

November 1 and November 2 are public holidays, and the period is called Undas, from the Spanish word for the observances around All Saints’ Day. What happens is not a quiet cemetery visit. Millions of people travel back to the provinces, airports and bus terminals fill for days beforehand, and cemeteries turn into all-day gatherings with tents, folding chairs, food, candles and music. Families clean and repaint graves, light candles, pray, and then sit with their dead for hours in the company of relatives they may see only once a year. October 31 functions as the travel day, which is why the city version of Halloween happens earlier in the week.

Pangangaluluwa and the older door-to-door custom

The Philippines had its own version of going door to door, and it was not about candy. In pangangaluluwa, groups moved through a village at night during the Undas period singing songs about souls in purgatory, and households gave rice cakes or money in exchange for prayers for their dead. The structure is the same as the old British custom of souling: performance, offering, and the dead as the reason. The practice has nearly disappeared from cities and survives only in some rural provinces. Its decline is usually blamed on the same forces that weakened neighborly visiting everywhere, plus the arrival of the American version.

Malls, offices and what people eat

Urban Halloween is organized rather than spontaneous. Malls run Halloween events through the second half of October, offices hold costume contests that have become a workplace tradition, and trick-or-treating usually happens inside gated subdivisions and condominium complexes where a homeowners association arranges it. Bars in Makati and Bonifacio Global City run themed nights. On the food side, the season belongs to kakanin, the rice cakes such as bibingka, puto and sapin-sapin sold in stalls near cemeteries, and to the food families bring to eat at the grave. Halloween parties themselves run on the national party menu: spaghetti, fried chicken and cake. Costumes lean toward imported characters, though local folklore supplies a few good options and the aswang has become a popular choice.

Do They Have Halloween in Italy

Yes, in the big cities and in schools, but Italy pushes back harder than most. The country has its own November days and sweets, and has spent twenty years arguing about whether it needs an American one.

Ognissanti, and the Italian resistance

November 1 is a public holiday. Ognissanti, All Saints’ Day, is followed on November 2 by il giorno dei morti, widely observed even where it is not an official day off. Families visit cemeteries and leave chrysanthemums, understood in Italy as the flower of the dead rather than a gift. Italy met Halloween in the 1990s and 2000s as a retail campaign, and the reaction was louder than in France or Spain. Catholic and cultural critics campaigned against it as a commercial import with no Italian roots, and a few municipalities promoted alternatives. That opposition did not stop the holiday. It shaped it, keeping it attached to bars and schools rather than to the street.

I morti, and the sweets of November

The Italian alternative is not an abstraction. In much of the south, especially in Sicily, tradition holds that the dead bring gifts to children on November 2. Children wake to presents and sweets said to have been left by i morti, the family’s own dead, which feels closer to a visit than to a party. The sweets of the season are named for the dead: fave dei morti, small almond cookies called beans of the dead, made across Lombardy, Umbria and Lazio, and ossa dei morti, harder almond biscuits sold in Puglia and Sicily. Italian children who want candy in early November have always had a way to get it: it arrives from their own family’s dead.

What Italian Halloween looks like in the cities

In Milan, Rome and Turin, Halloween is part of the calendar now. English-language schools run parties, bilingual families keep the door-to-door version, and bars hold costume nights that draw crowds. Children who do go out use the Italian phrase “dolcetto o scherzetto,” meaning sweet or trick, and some towns organize a supervised version in a piazza rather than on residential streets. Costumes are imported characters and horror standards. Restaurants offer themed menus for a fortnight. It is a going-out holiday in a country where the family observance two days later is still the one that empties the buses.

Do They Celebrate Halloween in Portugal

Less than in Spain and later than in France, and the reason is a much older custom occupying the same week and doing the same job.

Pão-por-deus and the older door-to-door custom

On November 1, Portuguese children traditionally go door to door asking for pão-por-deus, bread for God’s sake, and receive bread, cakes, dried fruit or, in recent decades, candy. It is a living relative of the medieval practice of going house to house to collect food in exchange for prayers for the dead, documented across the country in strong regional forms. In parts of the Alentejo and the Algarve the offering would be a santoro, a sweet bread cake with orange and cinnamon, sometimes shaped as a small figure. Some accounts link the custom to the hardship after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, though the practice itself is older.

Why Halloween arrived late and stayed small

Halloween only became visible in Portugal in the 2000s, arriving through the same channels as everywhere else: schools, malls, English courses and television. It landed in a crowded week. November 1 is a public holiday, families visit cemeteries, and the chestnut season is in full swing, which gives the country a set of seasonal habits that have nothing to do with pumpkins. There has also been an explicit cultural argument, made by teachers and commentators, that children asking for pão-por-deus are taking part in something Portuguese and should not be pushed toward an imported version of it. That argument has had more effect in schools than in shops.

What Portuguese Halloween looks like now

In practice, Lisbon and Porto have an adult Halloween and the rest of the country has a small one. Bars and clubs in both city centers run themed nights, and costume is expected. Shopping malls decorate and sell imported candy from early October. Supermarkets stock pumpkins, mostly for soup. Organized trick-or-treating happens in a few residential developments and international schools, and the Portuguese phrase, “doçura ou travessura,” is understood even by people who have never used it at a door. Pumpkin is not a traditional Portuguese ingredient for sweets, so the food of the season remains chestnuts, sweet potato and November cakes. Ask a Portuguese child what they do for candy in autumn and the answer involves two possible nights, one of which is older.

Do They Celebrate Halloween: Frequently Asked Questions

Does every country celebrate Halloween

No, and the pattern is not random. Participation tracks three things rather than any shared tradition: what the local calendar already holds in late October, whether people live behind a porch or an intercom, and whether the school system teaches English. Countries that already had an observance in the same week, such as Portugal, Sweden and Catalonia, either adapted the imported version or left it outside the door. Countries with an empty slot in late October, such as Canada and New Zealand, took it almost whole. Halloween is a retail and media import, so it goes where those channels are open.

Which countries have their own festival instead of Halloween

Several, and they are older answers to the same season rather than substitutes for a missing holiday. Catalonia has La Castanyada on October 31, with roasted chestnuts and panellets. Portugal has pão-por-deus on November 1, when children ask for bread and cakes rather than candy. The Netherlands has Sint-Maarten on November 11, with paper lanterns and a song at each door. Sweden has påskkärringar at Easter. Brazil put Dia do Saci on the same date as Halloween. Italy has i morti on November 2, and the Philippines has Undas on November 1 and 2. None of these were invented to compete with an American holiday. Most predate it by centuries.

Why do some countries celebrate Halloween and others do not

Institutions explain more than geography does. Halloween travelled through television, English-language schools and shopping malls, not through migration or missionaries, so it took root where those channels were open and where the week was free. Germany has Reformation Day on October 31, a public holiday in several states. France, Italy, Spain and Portugal all have public holidays on November 1. Where the calendar was already occupied, Halloween became a party rather than a tradition, which is exactly what happened in Paris, Rome and Lisbon.

Where did Halloween originate, and which country has celebrated it longest

The night grew out of Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of harvest, and it was marked in Scotland and Ireland for centuries before it reached North America. Scottish Gaelic calls it Oidhche Shamhna. Irish and Scottish migrants carried the name, the carved lantern and the door-to-door practice west in the nineteenth century. The countries that have celebrated it longest are therefore Scotland and Ireland, not the United States. What America contributed was scale, sweetness and the porch, and those are the parts that travelled back.

Is Halloween a public holiday anywhere

October 31 is a day off in a few places, and the reason is not Halloween. The clearest example is Germany, where Reformation Day is a public holiday in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, and, since 2018, in Hamburg, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Everywhere else in Europe, the public holidays connected to the season fall on November 1 and 2, when much of the continent and Latin America stops work. That one-day gap is a large part of why the American version remains a party night abroad.

Why do some countries celebrate Halloween in spring

Because they are in the Southern Hemisphere. New Zealand and Australia mark October 31 during their spring, with daylight saving already underway and the light lasting until roughly eight in the evening. Children go out in daylight, gardens are in new growth, and the whole autumn package has to be imported along with the holiday itself. Pumpkins are grown or brought in for the purpose. It is the clearest evidence that Halloween travels as a set of symbols rather than as an agricultural festival tied to a harvest.

Final Thoughts: What the Twenty Answers Have in Common

Put the twenty answers side by side and a pattern appears that has nothing to do with enthusiasm for American culture.

The first variable is what the calendar already holds. Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, Catalonia and Sweden all had a late October or early November observance before Halloween existed as an export, and all five adapted, absorbed or quietly refused. Canada, New Zealand and Australia had an empty slot in late October, and all three took the imported version almost whole. The second variable is housing. Where people live behind an intercom in an apartment tower, as in Seoul, Paris, Shanghai, Moscow and Amsterdam, Halloween moved indoors and became a ticketed event. Where people live behind a porch, as in Canada and most of suburban Ireland, the doorbell version survived intact. The third variable is the school system. In Brazil, Thailand and much of Italy, English-language education is where the holiday entered the culture, which is why it arrived with a vocabulary lesson attached.

None of this is a story of loss. A country that keeps pão-por-deus, Sint-Maarten or Dia do Saci is doing exactly what cultures do when a new practice arrives: it decides what to keep, what to change and what to leave outside. Portugal did not fail to adopt Halloween. It preferred bread. The Netherlands did not miss the American tradition. It had lanterns on November 11 and saw no reason to move them.

The American version is not the baseline against which everything else is measured. It is one version, with its own odd history, its own retail economics and its own porch architecture behind it. When people ask whether another country celebrates Halloween, what they usually mean is whether it celebrates Halloween the way they remember it. The honest answer, twenty times over, is that most places took the parts that fit and left the rest on the shelf.