Halloween In Malaysia

Happy Halloween! My bad for not posting anything about Halloween earlier and actually putting Thanksgiving first.

Halloween is a big night! I always love the idea of people dressing up and freaking other people out. Of course, kinky costumes also work for me. =P But that’s beside the point; The point is: Halloween is an important event in the American calendar, unfortunately it doesn’t really work the same way here in Malaysia.

This is what I think of usually when people mention Halloween: Families carving pumpkins into scary looking faces and places it outside their house; (or nowadays they just buy the ready-carved ones, or the plastic ones so they could recycle it the next year); Children dressed up as ghosts and ghouls, or witches and warlock, or maybe something scarier… like Elvis, and threaten their adult neighbours, in the cutest way possible, so that they will be given tons of candies that might eventually give them diabetes; It’s also the night for homosexuals the world over (especially gay boys) to dress up as cowboys, men in tight uniforms, or something like that, before heading out for a whole night of partying.

Living in Malaysia for the past twenty over years, here’s 10 reasons I think why Halloween can’t work in Malaysia:

01. Ghost and anything related to the unworldly being is a taboo to the Malaysian government.
02. FINAS will say that The Rakyat doesn’t believe in Halloween.
03. There are NO homosexuals in Malaysia. It’s illegal to be gay.
04. Chinese consider ghosts and ghouls as bad luck. Try going knocking on their door dressed up like a ghost. I swear they’ll kick your butt, children or not.
05. If they will beat you up for dressing up like a ghost, do you think you can still get candies from them?
06. Parents here believe in putting their kids to sleep… the earlier the better.
07. If a kid even as much as try to threaten an adult here, they will first beat the kid up, then tell the kid’s parents so that the kid will get another good beating.
08. We don’t have pumpkins big enough to be carved into scary faces.
09. Even if we do have sizable pumpkins available, we’re just not talented enough to carve a pumpkin into a scary face. The thought of craving one is already scary enough.
10. We don’t believe in Elvis. Pontianak is the in thing.