Last weekend I experienced my first Halloween ever and I really loved it. As I told you in one of my previous columns, we don’t really celebrate Halloween in Denmark, and if some Danes do, it is often just kids who dress up for kindergarten or elementary school. My friends and I started out celebrating Halloween on Friday night by going to Savage House Haunted Attraction in Mission Valley. I have never really been into horror movies, and I didn’t sleep for days the first time I watched “Titanic” as a kid. I was the type of kid that had a night lamp by the bed until I was way to old and I have never been a fan of the dark. But my friends convinced me that we hadn’t celebrated Halloween in America if we didn’t go to a haunted house. Savage House Haunted Attraction is a maze that mimicked a mental hospital where the actors are dressed as mental patients and doctors. It was extremely scary, I actually cried going through the house and my friends and I were running out of the house all sweaty from being so scared. It was actually so scary that one of my friends had trouble sleeping when we got home, but it was a fun experience and I think we started our Halloween celebration out pretty good. “Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it,” Lindsey Lohan says in the movie “Mean Girls.” On Saturday, my friends and I went Halloween costume shopping and as a girl you can choose between being dressed up as a sexy nurse, sexy police officer, sexy superhero, sexy prisoner or everything else with sexy in front of it. But since we are not from America, we didn’t really feel like going with the “Mean Girls” trend and I ended up buying a Pink Lady costume and a Mr. Incredible costume. Saturday night we went to a Halloween party all dressed up as Pink Ladies, and I must admit that we didn’t really fit in in our pink jackets with long sleeves and long pants. All the other girls were wearing either one of the sexy costumes we saw in the store, or just lingerie, bunny ears and a bunny tail. A note to ourselves: Wear less clothes if we ever celebrate Halloween in America again.
On the day of Halloween, all the people from the office dressed up in costumes and even though I felt like an idiot going to Von’s and taking an Uber dressed as Mr. Incredible, I think it was so much fun. I could never imagine people from my work at home dressing up in funny costumes at the office, and I think people would think I was crazy if I walked around in a superhero costume in a supermarket in Denmark.
I think Halloween is one of my new favorite holidays and I wish we celebrated it in Denmark. I will try to bring the tradition home with me. Mathilde Rousseau Bjerregaard is from Aarhus, Denmark. She is an editorial intern with San Diego Community Newspaper Group. Contact her at [email protected].