Destinations Known | The Hallo Hong Kong Halloween campaign – what is the point? Tourist board’s tacky 2023 campaign does not enhance city’s reputation as a holiday hotspot
- Gaudy stickers and dazzling billboards aimed at social-media-savvy visitors ‘will keep your Instagram game strong’, according to the Hallo Hong Kong webpage
- Why not at least make these Day-Glo decals and posters of ‘cute characters’ reflective of Hong Kong’s culture and history instead of old European traditions?
What the hell has happened to Halloween? Apart from it becoming every self-respecting copywriter’s worst nightmare, of course!
The commercialisation of Halloween has been a long and ever more heavily marketed process.
The first mention in the pages of the South China Morning Post was on November 1, 1927: “Last night the Scots of the Colony celebrated Hallowe’en, at least those who are members of the Volunteers did, and they observed it right royally.
“The celebration […] took the form of a dinner given by the Scottish Company of the Hongkong Volunteer Defence Corps at Volunteer Headquarters. It was a typically Scottish gathering.
“There were the kilts and the pipes, the Haggis and the Barley Brae and, of course, some of the old and popular Scottish songs, with their rollicking choruses.”
The roots of the celebration stretch back centuries before those rollicking choruses, to Allhallowtide, the period of the Christian liturgical year dedicated to remembering saints (“hallows”) and other faithful dead.
