Halloween in Europe

Halloween is the jumping off point for the Geo Quiz this time. The place we’re looking for is in Europe, but in at least one village, you’ll find witches, warlocks, ghosts and goblins — and some very excited children. This country has three official languages, count them: three.

Though many people think of it as a country of two fiercely competing languages, with two groups of people who – even centuries on – still can’t get along.

Still guessing?

The World’s Clark Boyd speaks with anchor Lisa Mullins about the challenges of celebrating an American tradition in a place where the locals are a bit wary of it. Clark lives in Belgium, the answer to the Geo Quiz and he has a young daughter who’s raring to go trick-or-treating for Halloween.

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LISA MULLINS: Halloween is the jumping off point for our Geo Quiz today. The place we’re looking for is in Europe. Need more? Okay, but in at least one village, you’re going to find witches, warlocks, ghosts and goblins and some very excited children. This country has not one, not two, but three official languages. Even so a lot of people think of it as a country of two fiercely competing languages, and two groups of people who, even centuries on, still can’t get along. Still guessing?  Well, I’ll tell you the answer, and how one American has been searching for a place to celebrate Halloween this year, in just about a minute. I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Halloween is Sunday. Most any kid in America knows that. And increasingly, kids in other countries know the holiday, too. But in some places, there is resistance for some reason, to having children go out in the dark in scary costumes and collect gobs and gobs of candy. Well, that’s the case in Belgium, which is the answer to our Geo Quiz, by the way. Belgium is also where The World’s Clark Boyd is right now. And what’s a man got to do in Belgium to arrange for his little girl to go trick or treating.

CLARK BOYD:  Well, it’s a fairly detailed process actually. We had to do some serious research and some serious digging. Essentially our first point of contact was, of course, our daughter’s school and say is the school doing anything for Halloween? Are you allowing kids to come to school dressed up? And we received a very curt email back from the headmaster saying well you Americans find Halloween to be fairly normal, here in Belgium the Belgians find it to be macabre and unpleasant.

MULLINS:  Well, that’s the whole point.

BOYD: Yeah. Well that was kind of what I was tempted to say to the headmaster as well.

MULLINS: By the way, when you say headmaster, how old is your daughter?

BOYD: My daughter’s four and a half.

MULLINS: Oh, so this is an age appropriate holiday?

BOYD: Yes, for her. I mean she, that’s all she’s been talking about. For the last two months, all I’ve heard is daddy I can’t wait to be a butterfly fairy princess, ballet dancer, sort of thing.

MULLINS: Alright. So she’s old enough to know about Halloween clearly and look forward to it, but she’s feeling a little bit lonely. So how did you Clark help her out?

BOYD: Once we heard that the school wasn’t really going to be doing anything for Halloween, I started digging around because what I noticed when I looked around was that what the headmaster of the school told me wasn’t squaring with what I was seeing on the streets. I mean the storefronts are filled with Halloween displays. There is Halloween candy in the grocery stores. There were bars and cafes that were offering Halloween happy hours. So we started digging around a little bit and we actually found a community outside of Brussels, out in the Flemish region of the country, which said that they were going to do an American-style Halloween. Se we signed up and last night we took her out there.

MULLINS:  So what was that like? Did it look like an American Halloween?

BOYD: You know, it looked like a little suburb. There was a golf course nearby. It could have been any suburban community in the United States. The decorations were fantastic. There were people who were scaring the kids as they came up to the door. All the kids were really into it. Their costumes were fantastic. And I have to say that the only big difference was, is that when you open the door you didn’t know whether you were going to be speaking Dutch, French or English.

MULLINS: And how about the Halloween treats?

BOYD: The Halloween treats. Yes, my daughter has become a connoisseur now of the European candy varieties. There are a lot of Gummi Bear sorts of things. Haribo is very popular, these little Gummi Bears. She got a lot of chewy fruit sorts of things. And of course the requisite chocolate, so she was quite happy.

MULLINS: Absolutely. And what makes her dad happy in Halloween candy terms?

BOYD: Not that I would ever, ever, ever take any Halloween candy from my child, but I’m quite partial to the European variety of Kit Kat bars.

MULLINS: If you reach into that little sack, no one’s going to tell, Clark. The World’s Clark Boyd in Brussels. Happy Halloween.

BOYD: Thank you, Lisa. Same to you.

MULLINS:  And you can watch Clark’s quest to celebrate Halloween with his daughter in Belgium in an audio slide show at TheWorld.org.

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