What the English?! #1: Halloween

Hello fellow weirdos, and welcome to the first episode of “What the English?!”.

This podcast is for intermediate English learners who want to listen to interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes weird content spoken in clear and natural English.

Do you want to speak better English? To speak better English you need to listen to English, a lot of English. If you can listen while reading the English, even better. That's why I'll always provide the transcript to the “What the English? !” podcast episodes.

In case you're wondering, I speak a little slower in these episodes than I do in real life. But (in super slow voice) not so slow you want to die.

Ok, let's do this...

So, who am I? Well, my name is Jahrine and I'm a British citizen and a Canadian citizen. I'm from Wales, a small country in the UK with a very strong culture. There are some weird and wonderful things about Wales that I can't wait to share with you in a future episode. After university in the UK, I moved to Japan, where I taught English for three years. I was there when the 2011 earthquake happened, right in the epicentre, but that's a story for another day.

I met my Canadian husband in Japan and we decided to live in his homecity, Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. I became a Canadian citizen in 2018 and I've been living in Canada now for eight years. We have a son and a dog and we live in the north of the city which is full of huge trees and has stunning ski mountains! Vancouver is a beautiful city to live in, but it's expensive. It's actually one of the most expensive cities in the world.

I'm going to cover topics I find intriguing in this podcast, and I hope you find them intriguing too. If you ever want me to talk about a subject, please feel free to let me know at hiwhattheenglish@gmail.com. That's h-i-w-h-a-t-t-h-e-e-n-g-l-i-s-h@gmail.com.

So, I hope you enjoy this first episode of What the English?! It's about the holiday celebrated on this day, October 31st. My favourite holiday… Halloween.

If you love sweet treats, dressing up in costumes and being scared, you must love Halloween. Never celebrated Halloween? Here's what it's all about.

Halloween happens on October 31st every year and is celebrated in many countries around the world: The United States, Canada, the UK, Japan, Mexico and more. Different countries celebrate in different ways, and some countries, like the US and Canada, are more serious about traditions like pumpkin carving, dressing up in costumes, trick-or-treating and decorating homes.

But why is it celebrated? Halloween started as a new year celebration by the Celtic people. These people, also known as “Celts”, lived in what we now call Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the country I come from, and parts of England and France.

The Celts also believed that, on the night of October 31st the wall between the world of the living and the world of the dead was thin, so spirits could walk through and were all around us. Maybe that's a new word for you: “spirit”. It means ghost, or person who has died.

If spirits exist, then it makes sense that there would be good spirits and bad spirits, just like there are good and bad people in the world. The Celts didn't want to meet any bad spirits on the night of Halloween, as you can understand, so they carved scary faces in vegetables like turnips and dressed up in creepy costumes so the bad spirits would be scared away.

Nowadays we carve scary or silly faces in pumpkins, called jack-o-lanterns, and put candles inside. It's messy, but good fun. You can save and bake the pumpkin seeds too, they're really good for you. Children went door-to-door in costumes performing for food and drinks during the celtic new year celebration. It was called “mumming” then, but now we call it trick-or-treating and it's the highlight of Halloween for lots of excited kids.

The tradition of dressing up is still popular today, even with adults. The Celtic people would try to look scary on Halloween, and that's still popular now, but many people also like to dress up as something funny or sexy! Go to any big Halloween party and you will for sure bump into a sexy cat or bunny or a shirtless Tarzan!

So the Celts started the Halloween holiday. How did it become such a big deal in North America, particularly the United States?

Well, as you might know, in the middle of the 19th century many Irish immigrants left Ireland to live in the United States. They were searching for a better life as times were tough in Ireland. Of course, these immigrants brought their traditions and holidays with them, including Halloween.

The holiday is now more popular in the States than any other country. Americans take Halloween very seriously!

Now, I've never been to the US at Halloween, but I have celebrated Halloween in three countries: the UK, Canada and Japan. Here are the big differences in how these countries celebrate.

I spent my whole childhood in the UK, and so all of my trick-or-treating was done there. You might be wondering, what happens if the kids don't get a treat? Well, that's where the “trick” comes in. Traditionally, if someone doesn't give out a treat, or sometimes even if they don't answer the door, kids will do something naughty, like throw an egg at the house! I have to admit, when I was about 12, I was one of those naughty kids running around on Halloween night throwing eggs at people's houses. I'm not proud of it!

When I was a kid trick-or-treating in Wales, not too many people opened the door to give out treats. Halloween was seen more as a North American holiday, and not something us Brits needed to celebrate too much. You now understand how funny that is, us Celts started Halloween!

This always made me sad as a kid who loved all things spooky and whose favourite time of year was Halloween. Nowadays, I hear from friends back home that it's different. There are more parties and Halloween events. Lots more people take part in trick-or-treating too, and even decorate the outside of their homes.

I hear that costumes are easier to find in the stores in the UK now too. When I was a kid I would always wear a black garbage bag for my witch or vampire costume! Every year. Black garbage bag with a witch hat and witch nails on the tips of my fingers or a black garbage bag with plastic vampire teeth and slicked back hair.

Maybe the reason Halloween isn't such a big holiday in the UK is because Brits are more interested in the holiday that comes right after it on November 5th: Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Bonfire Night, is the celebration of a thwarted terrorist attack. Thwarted might be a new word to you. When something is thwarted, it means it was stopped, it didn't actually happen.

Guy Fawkes and his buddies tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London but their plan was thwarted. This was the 1600s, so the punishment for plotting to blow up parliament was medieval: he was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Can you figure out what that means? Hanged by the neck, dragged by a horse and cut into four pieces! Yep, pretty gross! Luckily for Fawkes, he died during step one as his neck broke while he was hanged. Lucky Guy!

In the UK we celebrate this thwarted attack by setting off fireworks and burning huge bonfires. Many people still create a “Guy” out of old stuffed clothes and then throw him on the fire to cheers from the crowd. Lovely!

So Halloween in the UK isn't such a huge deal. But what about in Japan? Well, Japan doesn't have a huge population of immigrants from Celtic countries, but the Japanese are very interested in American culture. Halloween in Japan is low-key and very commercialized. It's basically a chance for the candy companies to create spooky versions of their treats and for Tokyo Disney to run with a theme.

When I lived in Japan almost 10 years ago, no one was carving pumpkins or trick-or-treating. Kids dressed up to go to school and there might be a Halloween theme in English class, but that was about it. There were plenty of Halloween nights at bars and nightclubs, but the people who made the most effort with costumes were usually foreigners. So Halloween in Japan, as you can imagine, not a big thing.

Maybe some of you listeners have a more recent experience of Halloween in Japan. If so, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Now to Canada, where I've lived for the past eight years and where Halloween is a big deal.

Canadians love Halloween. There are lots of planned events for kids and adults: pumpkin patches with corn mazes, a kind of labyrinth in a corn field, haunted houses, costume parties, haunted tours, trick-or-treating (you can even take kids trick-or-treating at malls and shopping centers and people in the stores give out candy!) and lots more.

If you go to a costume party for Halloween here in Canada, you can expect everyone to be dressed up and in the Halloween spirit. There's that word “spirit” again. When used this way though, “in the spirit”, it means that someone is really enthusiastic about something, they're really involved. You could say, for example, “in the Christmas spirit” or “in the festival spirit.”

Lots of homes in Canada are decorated for Halloween, inside and out, and most people answer the door with treats when kids come trick-or-treating. One way of telling if a home is giving out candy is to check for a glowing jack-o-lantern in a window or in the doorway. Some people even leave bowls of candy outside for kids to help themselves!

Perhaps my favourite thing about Halloween in Canada though is the haunted houses. A haunted house is a house that has been decorated with one thing in mind: scaring the people who enter! There are rooms filled with creepy and sometimes disturbing scenes. Some decorations jump out at you, and some decorations aren't decorations at all... there are usually actors in haunted houses waiting to jump out and chase you. Not for the faint hearted! (That means don't go into to a haunted house if you have a weak heart as you might not come out alive!)

There are official haunted houses run by companies who rent spaces each year and there are unofficial haunted houses run by people in their own homes. The official haunted houses are usually run out of warehouses and there are multiple actors waiting for you around every corner. There is a haunted house just down the road from where I live that is run out of the garage and basement of a home. The husband and wife who run it have been doing it for almost 15 years and each year they add some new theme. Their neighbors volunteer to dress up and jump out at people who dare enter. I'm a little ashamed to say that I went with my sister one year and pushed her ahead of me when I realized what I thought was a clown decoration was, in fact, a person waiting to pounce!

Though I've never been to the States at Halloween, I hear that they take haunted houses very seriously down there. There's even a haunted house in the state of Tennessee that requires anyone who wants to go in to sign a 40-page contract to enter, and if you survive you can win $20,000. What could possibly require a 40-page contract, you ask. Well, here are some lines from the contract I found online:

- Participant fully understands and agrees that water torture may be used.

- Participant fully understands and agrees that if they are selected to visit the “Dentist” that they may have a tooth extracted without Novacain, which is the drug that makes sure you don't feel the pain.

… Um, excuse me?! Who would actually sign up for this? And what kind of people would run a haunted house like this? I'm all for getting scared, but this seems like an excuse by some sick people to hurt people and get away with it. After all, you sign your life away before entering this house. I'll add a link in the description if you want to read over the rest of the contract. It's disturbing.

The house is called the McKamey Manor, and my advice is to stay away! Unless you want some free dental work.

So there it is, the sweet and scary holiday of Halloween. Do you celebrate Halloween in your country? If yes, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

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