Hannover Halloween, sort of

It's hard to follow up on the posts about Istanbul and get back to the day to day here in Hannover. We got back into town a few days before Halloween, happy to sleep in a softer bed and dreaming of views from the hills of Istanbul.

Does Halloween exist in Germany? Yes and no. People know what it is, but it's regarded as an imported-novelty holiday. You can find a few paper plates with pumpkins on them, and a few kid-sized costumes in stores, and the occasional jack-o-lantern in a window. When people do dress up for Halloween, it's usually as something gory and scary. Fake blood is a must.

The last few days made me miss the parade of kids in costume showing up at our door on Halloween night, the Halloween parties we've thrown in the past, and the cardboard gravestones we used to put in the front yard. We have most of those party decorations up in our apartment, but no one was knocking on our door Wednesday night. Brian and I did some searching and managed to buy a few pumpkins and gourds the other day. I carved one little one - it turned out to have an  Oscar the Grouch kind of face.

So we had to be content with watching scary movies and eating from our skeleton plates. Allegedly, German kids do sometimes go trick-or-treating, but I didn't see any and none were apparently interested in hiking it up the stairs to our apartment.

In the stores there have been Christmas decorations and candies out for weeks already. Here there are no buffer holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving. Except in our house. We are planning an all day Thanksgiving extravaganza that will test the people-holding and potato-mashing capacity of our apartment.

In a real gory and scary Halloween event, a dead body was found in the Maschsee yesterday. It was a woman who was decapitated and last seen alive on Saturday. I guess Hannover is not as quiet and safe as I thought.  When that stuff happens in real life, super hero costumes seem like a good idea to me.