The trend of celebrating Halloween began in Norway around twenty years ago, but it has only really taken off in the last five or ten years. Norwegian kids first learned about Halloween by reading Donald Duck & Co., the country’s most popular comic books, thanks to the ‘jack-o-lanterns’ carved by Donald’s nephews and their practice of Trick-or-Treat. Just like Christmas Trees, Halloween came to Norway via Sweden, where children had celebrated it since the mid 1990s. Before the late ‘90s, Halloween was virtually unknown in Norway, so much so that when the cartoon classic “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” was translated into Norwegian, the Great Pumpkin became the ‘Old Man of Olsok’! Halloween in Norway is a lot similar to Halloween in the States, even if Norwegian kids say “knask eller knep” or “digg eller deng” (both meaning roughly “trick or treat”) instead of saying “trick or treat”, when the door is answered. The traditional Norwegian children’s game ‘lommelykt i høstmørket’, a combination of hide-and-seek and treasure-hunt played with flashlights in the darkness of fall nights, has a lot in common with Halloween: just add costumes and goodies on the evening of All Saint’s Day and there you have it!
