Daily Dose of English 214
Halloween
Daily Dose of English 214
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. Because in this episode, we're going to be talking about Halloween, the spooky season of the spooky holiday. Because today, at least when this episode is coming out, is Halloween. Oh, I can't keep it, don't step on my... What's that called? It's not a mouse, it's a keyboard. Don't step on my keyboard, dude. Okay. So, the 31st of... October, wow. The 31st of October is always Halloween. It always lands on the last day of October. And it is meant to be a bit of a spooky holiday. I think it's become sort of famous enough that most of the world at least knows that Halloween exists. If they don't actually celebrate it, which you might, I don't know. I don't know where Halloween is actually like celebrated. Halloween. I spelled it wrong. It's got two E's and one W. I said W-W-E. All Halloween, let's see, where is it? Looks like it's a Christian holiday, so probably in countries that have a lot of influence from that have something similar. I can't really find a list quickly on this. on this Wikipedia article, so I'm just going to continue talking about Halloween because I don't actually know. But it seems like there's some version of... Oh yeah, here it is. Observed by many Western Christians and many non-Christians around the world. Wait, that's completely useless. Oh, geography of Halloween. So it looks like there's like US, Canada, Brazil, there's a different kind of thing in Mexico, China. Okay, but they all have like something it looks like, right? Chinese celebrate the Hungry Ghost Festival in mid-July. So, okay, that's not even close to the same time of year. But yeah, here it says like Japan mostly has Halloween because of American pop culture. So yeah, it looks like there's various things around the world. Anyways, I'm getting very distracted. I want to talk a little bit about what we do for Halloween in the US. So the core thing is like spookiness and scariness. I talked a bit about this in the spooky season episode, but lots of people decorate their houses with spiders, ghosts, witches, zombies, skeletons, all sorts of spooky things, graves, lots of stuff. Many people put up lights or moving statues, right? People love these statues that move and try to scare you. Everything's brown or orange and black. And a lot of people carve pumpkins. That's probably one of my favorite things to do. When you carve a pumpkin, you get a big old pumpkin, but you often go to the pumpkin patch to get them because pumpkins grow quite well in the US climate. So you go to a big place that has a bunch of pumpkins growing and you pick out your pumpkin and you take it home and then you open it from the top. So you cut out a hole, you open the pumpkin and you take out everything on the inside. So all of the seeds, all of the like, there's like these sort of stringy things inside. You take that all out. And you can either compost it or you can actually make the seeds into pumpkin seeds that you can sort of dry them, roast them, dehydrate them, whatever it is, and put like some salt and maybe some other things on them and they're really good. You can also buy pumpkin seeds in lots of stores. But then you have this big old pumpkin. So once you've cleaned it out, it's nice and clean on the inside, you actually will take a, usually like a pen or something like that, and you'll probably draw a shape onto your pumpkin or something that you can, maybe a little bit spooky or whatever. There are also lots of like guides that you can print out and you can onto a piece of paper or they come in, they already come in a little booklet and you can cut them out or print them out and sort of tape them over your pumpkin and then use that as a stencil. So a stencil is something that you use to help you draw better by sort of drawing around the shape that you want that you don't, you're less likely to make a mistake. Why are you eating my pen? Stop. This is not yours. This is my pen. It is not for you to eat, sir. Thank you. Okay, back to the pumpkin thing. Once you have your shape laid out, you take a, usually you wanna take like a pointy thing, because the pumpkins are quite thick. So a pointy thing can help you to make like initial dots or like start the cutting process, because what you need to do is cut through the entire pumpkin. They're usually like an inch or an inch and a half thick. So if you make a couple of dots, it can be really, really helpful for cutting later. Because then you're going to take a little knife and you're gonna stick it into the pumpkin and you're going to slowly cut around your shapes. It is sort of difficult because they're so thick and you have to be very careful not to mess up or create a weird slice in your pumpkin or something. And then you slowly like cut out pieces until you have this empty space in your pumpkin, which is the shape of something. And then when you put a light inside or a candle and you put it outside at dark at dark at night, it looks really cool. It lights up and you can see like the face or whatever it is. You can also get really, really fancy with it, right? Some people will also just take off the skin in some sections, so they get like the orangeness of the pumpkin on the outside, then they have like the yellowness of the skin of the inside, and then they also have the open sections that they carve out. You can also get even fancier and do a shape on the back of the pumpkin, and then put it against a wall, because that way, the pumpkin will then sort of project that shape against a wall or something like that. And so, basically, what ends up happening is that a lot of people will carve a pumpkin, and then they will put it outside their house, and when it gets dark, they'll light the pumpkin, so that as you walk around the neighborhood, you see a lot of pumpkins outside with candles in them that look really cool. is the idea. Depending on where you live, it can be really great or kind of terrible, but yeah. Fun, I guess, fact is my mom's birthday is just two days before Thanksgiving, before Halloween. And one of her favorite things to do as a family is to carve pumpkins. So that's what we did a lot growing up on our birthday. We'd carve pumpkins because pumpkins don't last very long either, right? So we'd get them, we'd carve them, and then they'd last a couple of days. And by like the first or second of November, that's when they were kind of starting to get a little bit old and mushy and started to go bad. Some people have a tradition of a couple days after Halloween, they go around and they take pumpkins off people's porches and they smash them, because they get really fun to smash and they're really goopy and gross and nobody really wants their pumpkin. The only annoyance is that if it's out on the street and it's just like kind of gross, but smashing pumpkins is a thing that people do. It's not that common. I don't know anybody that does it, but it has happened before. Um, and so yeah, Smashing Pumpkins is also a band, which is where they get that name from. What else is there to say about Halloween? Oh, like you also dress up. That's a pretty core of the sport. Why can't I say the right word today? It's a pretty core of the holiday is that people dress up and then they go trick or treating. Trick or treating is usually for younger kids, but they often usually go with their parents as well. And that's where you go from house to house. So you dress up in a Halloween costume and you go to a, house and you knock on the door, you ring the doorbell, and they open the door and you say, trick or treat, and then they give you some sort of little bit of candy. Candy is what usually happens, however, sometimes it's whatever else. And then you go to the next house, right? So kids love this, right? They get free candy. It's really fun to go places. You see people from the neighborhood. They see your costume. If you have a cool costume, they comment on it. There is no trick, by the way. I don't know how this started, but like what you were saying is like, you have to do a trick or give us a treat, right? You have to do a trick or give a treat, right? Trick or treat. People always give treats. That's just what it is, right? There's always some kind of little snack or candy or whatever. And then you go around to a lot of houses and then you go back and you have candy. A lot of kids like that, it also doesn't stop there, right? Then you sort your candy, you trade your candy, it becomes like this thing that you play with, right? It sort of becomes this toy of whatever it is. And so I remember like, I really liked trading candy. I would sort it all, I would find, I would like try to get all of these ones that I liked or whatever for my friends, because there's only like what, 15 different pieces of candy that you can really get that are different. And so lots of people would have their favorite candy that they'd trade for or whatever it is. Um, but. It's also fairly common for people to do a, like a swap, right? Cause lots of parents don't really want their kid to have just a ton of candy. Um, and so they either will like ration it. So they'll take the candy and they'll hide it away. And you can have a little bit over the, over the course of like the year or the next couple of months or whatever, right? You have a little bit at a time rather than just letting the kid have as much goddamn candy as they want. Or a lot of parents will also sort of do an exchange where they'll say, Hey, I'll trade you all of your candy for a new toy or a Lego set or whatever it is. And that's what I, uh, what my family always did because, uh, we didn't really eat very much candy at all. Like we'd have a little bit on Halloween. Um, but then it's like, okay, the rest goes to the Halloween, to the, uh, Halloween fairies, what we called it. And so we would go to bed and then the next day my parents would take away the candy and they would replace it with usually a Lego set, like I said, is what we liked. So nothing huge, they were probably like $20, which back then is probably like $25 or something like that. So I think it's a reasonable trade for stopping your child from ingesting a massive amount of candy because you can get a pretty good amount of candy on Halloween. You end up with a fairly decent amount. That's generally how the holiday goes. Many adults or younger adults who don't have kids will go to a party or something like that, like a Halloween party where they dress up, where there's usually drinks and a bunch of people. Some people go to dinner. Some people make dinner. Some people don't do anything, right? They like to stay home and just give out candy or stay home and not give out candy. Oh, that's another thing. That's the rule in At least where I grew up, if the porch light is on, that means that you can go up and knock on the door. If the porch light is off, that means that they don't want any visitors at the house or they're not home. So most houses in the US have a porch, which is like that front section that you can walk up to before you get to the door. And they almost all have a light, right? So that you can see what you're doing when it's dark outside, right? And so if you have the light on, that means that you're, you're allowed to go knock on the door and say, trick or treat. If the light is off, that's the sign that nobody's home or they don't want visitors. So that's the rule. Why did I bring that up? Oh yeah. Cause some people stay home and they turn off the light and they don't have candy and they just have a quiet night or whatever. Lots of people love Halloween. I think it's a really cool holiday. I also like the aspect of going outside and going around to different places and stuff. And so, yeah, it's a cool one. It's, yeah. The last thing I wanna say is that after Halloween in the US, that's the best time to buy candy, if you buy candy, because it suddenly goes on sale. Everything is more expensive during, like Halloween stuff is more expensive before Halloween and less expensive after Halloween. And so a lot of people, what they actually do is they will wait until after Halloween to buy all the candy that they're going to give out the next year, for the next Halloween, because it's like half the price. And candy lasts basically forever because it's made of sugar and other processed things, so it doesn't go bad or anything. And so they get a bunch of cheap candy, maybe some new decorations or whatever, and then they wait for next year. Um, but yeah, that is pretty much everything. I do also want to quickly talk about a spirit Halloween actually. So spirit Halloween is a brand of retail stores that just sells Halloween stuff. And you might think that's a terrible business idea, but what they do is they actually take over stores that didn't do well in the year, and they convert them for just a few months into a spirit Halloween, and then they leave. They take all of their stuff, they put it back in storage for the next year. And so it's this seasonal business, and that actually sort of preys upon other businesses failing. right, because what happens is that a business goes out of business, is what we say. So let's say like a target has to close. A target closes and then Spirit Halloween says to whoever the landowner is, hey, we'll rent this place really cheap, but we'll rent it for a couple months. And so the landowner goes, okay, we're not using this for anything else, so sure, go ahead and rent this for really, really cheap, right, like probably half the price. So they rent this place that should be expensive, but they get it for quite cheap. They bring in all of their stuff, they put up a couple of signs, and then they have a spirit Halloween in just like a week or two. They also have pretty good marketing and people generally like the stuff that they sell. So it's relatively well known for that kind of thing, even though they only exist for a couple of months out of the year. It's also interesting because Spirit Halloween tends to do better when other businesses do worse, right? Because they get better deals on rent and stuff like that, and more businesses go out of business and yada yada yada. And so when Spirit Halloween does really well, that's kind of a sign for the rest of the economy, which I just think is kind of interesting. Not actually like a perfect sign, but it's definitely related. Um, and so if you're ever in the U S during the Halloween season, probably in like, um, September, October, November, you might see a spirit of Halloween and you could go inside. There's some interesting stuff there and they don't stick around forever. Um, but that is everything for today. Nice long episode for Halloween. Um, I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learn a little something about the U S or Halloween. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a comment below and tell me what kind of spooky holiday you have in your country. I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.
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