Party | Now we’re celebrating Halloween, even though it’s actually time for a traditional Finnish celebration

Is that festive moment of the year again, when you dress up as a witch, go around pranking from door to door, eat goodies and burn candles in ghost lanterns.

So it’s time to celebrate.

Kekri is a traditional Finnish harvest festival dating back at least a thousand years. Its customs are reminiscent of another – nowadays better known – celebration, Halloween.

The hallmark of Halloween are pumpkin lanterns. The pumpkin is hollowed out, eye holes are pierced in the shell, and a candle is placed inside. Get a ghostly lantern.

When celebrating kekri, it was customary to make a lantern out of turnips. The turnip is an excellent root, whose current reputation does not correspond to the significant position it had in Finnish life for centuries. The turnip lantern gave a narrow light. It was aptly called the thorn spike.

If traditions had been preserved, markets would not be selling Halloween candy now. Instead, there would be plump fodder turnips available for making stilt spikes.

Biscuits was the god of fertility, farming and herding. As a celebration, kekri was also known by, among other things, names rope and rope. The party was celebrated when the autumn season’s work had been completed. The crops had been harvested, the cattle had been taken to shelter and the beers had been put away. Then the party!

The celebration of Kekri took place between the end of September and the beginning of November. It was the most important holiday of the year in the agricultural society. Kekri was also considered as the turn of the year. The spread of Christianity to Finland brought new features to kekeri during the 11th century. Kekri was mixed with commemoration of the dead, and it started to be celebrated in connection with All Saints’ Day.

In some parts of Finland, kekri was a more important celebration than Christmas and Easter even at the beginning of the 20th century.

Of course, harvest festivals have been celebrated in different parts of the world. The feast of the Celts was called samhain. Celts also used turnips for lanterns.

Irish immigrants brought the Samhain celebration with them to North America. There they started making lanterns from pumpkins. Also in North America, the celebration was combined with commemoration of the dead and martyrs. All Hallows’ Evei.e. All Saints’ Eve, later became established as Halloween.

In Finland, kekri celebrations waned when people moved from the countryside to the cities. Fewer and fewer had crops to harvest. In the 20th century, the popularity of Christmas increased. Christmas was emphasized in public schools and in the media. Kekri was forgotten.

Then Hollywood hit. With the American films and TV series, the celebration of Halloween reached Finland as well.

So the tradition party made a trip to the other side of the Atlantic and came back rebranded.

Biscuits this would be needed! It would be just the right celebration for this nostalgic time, where it feels like things used to be better, or at least not as cool as they are now. Besides, the kekri was a pure celebration of work, a reward for hard work, and not something out of the blue, like today’s commercial Halloween. Kekri was also a celebration that united the people, it was celebrated by the hosts and the crofters together.

Attempts have been made to revive Kekri. In the late 1940s, the rural association tried to revive it as a political celebration. The company did not survive into modern times.

Now the cookie tradition is maintained by the Peasant Culture Foundation. On its website, it offers tips for, among other things, making biscuit dishes.

Halloween is on Monday 31.10. Of course, many are already celebrating it this weekend.

If you prefer to hang out, it’s easy. Many customs related to kekri have been transferred to other parties, so we already have the customs. Kekrin includes, among other things, roasting a lamb, giving gifts, pouring tin, lighting a bonfire and taking a sauna. It is also customary to pull the handles.