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When I first moved to Sevilla there was no sign of anything Halloween, other than a few candies and masks available in the Marks & Spencer food section. And of course that seemed normal, except that Halloween was never a UK thing either, and I supposed M&S was carrying this stuff for North American expats. Fast forward twenty years and suddenly everybody is dressing up, there are cobwebs and spiders and witches and zombies all over the place. WTF? It feels weird. Mostly because it’s just a copy of what people here have seen in US films and TV series. Second hand customs created by marketing moguls.
casa azahar 
The marketing of every holiday is a sad fact in the US and I suppose everywhere. Store costumes existed when I was a little kid, but they were spectacularly tacky and came with a plastic mask that suffocated you. Lots of people still cooked up their own fanciful dress. The longer I live, the more the holidays — all of them — have turned into “today is X holiday so buy all this stuff and then consume it (or show it off)” and “let’s have a big drunk party with bad music, just like all the other big drunk parties people have.” Almost nothing is left of the reason for the holiday (unless some bunch of fundies wants to lay sole claim to the right to have a solstice festival). I am so over it.
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We used to make our own Halloween costumes when I was a kid, which was part of the fun. Here I just see those tacky pre-made plasticky ones. Thing is, in Canada and the US there’s a long Halloween tradition that wasn’t commercially driven. The only Halloween “traditions” in the UK and Spain are totally driven by marketing crap shite.
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