Halloween has been rapidly adopted and turned into a month-long festival in Hong Kong but don't expect to see too many children trick-or-treating, says Joseph Bosco, associate professor in anthropology at Chinese University. Halloween has become a big event in Hong Kong in a very short space of time. When we first came to the city in 1992, it was difficult to buy items for Halloween and we had to get things for our children from the US. Look around this year and you'll see so much Halloween stuff in the shops. I think it is primarily commercially driven, but the public is more than willing to go along with this - they are not being fooled into it. Also there is this concept of the 'carnivalisation' of shopping. The shopping mall has become a kind of carnival. They are always having shows and events. If you were to take the Mid-Autumn Festival and drag it out and make it a month-long festival, people would feel it was too commercial. But by using something that is clearly foreign and that they consider cosmopolitan and fun it doesn't bother anybody's sensibilities, and it seems perfectly appropriate. Hong Kong people view the Mid-Autumn Festival as a one-day thing. It isn't something you can promote for the whole month. There's a lot more that they can bring in with the ghosts, the pumpkins, the popcorn and the candy that comes with Halloween. It is something new and extra. I don't think customers' views are as crassly commercial as they would be if they did it with the Mid-Autumn Festival. I don't think Halloween and the Mid-Autumn Festival are really competing with each other. You are doing it with different groups of people. It is rather like Christmas and New Year where Christmas is a family holiday and New Year's Eve is spent with friends. Part of modern consumerism is consuming experiences, and I just view this as another experience that people consume. That's why it is even appropriate to bring your children to Lan Kwai Fong to look at the gweilos dressed up in their costumes. You see a large number of families with children just there to have a look. My students at Chinese University say western ghosts are not frightening. They find the characters we use for Halloween, in particular the witch, as fun. They don't have an evil association with the witch. They know they are bad, but bad in a playful way. Halloween first appeared in the US after the Irish potato famine. Large numbers of Irish people came to the US and brought the festival with them. But it has changed over time. Sometimes, young people playing pranks was the most salient element of the festival, and at one stage, the tradition of children going out and getting candies from people waned. It was viewed as dangerous and something respectable people didn't do. Then as society became more stable or peaceful, children would go back out in larger numbers to get candies. In different places, the cycle has been different at different times. Trick-or-treating is something American children do at the homes of people they know. For young people, it is the first time they go out with their cohort and that's another thing that makes it a great holiday - going out with their peers for the first time. They do it at six or seven with parents supervising in the background - a group of neighbourhood children going off together with parents in the distance, standing back watching. At 10 or 12 they go on their own and parents stay at home. It is an important rite of passage. I would be very surprised if that tradition got picked up in Hong Kong. The idea of going up to strangers is culturally quite bizarre here. In a sense you are going up and demanding things of neighbours, behaving in a very un-neighbourly way, but in the process you are creating a real sense of a neighbourhood. There was a tradition in Ireland of putting flames inside various vegetables. The pumpkin became the vegetable of choice and I just think it is a beautiful symbol. It is a symbol of the end of the harvest, and it comes as the real winter is setting in. In northern Europe, the end of October is when the harvest is done and it gets cold and rainy. Putting a flame inside a pumpkin - which is round and orange like the Sun - is a great representation of the hope for the Sun coming back at the end of the winter.