Halloween In The Netherlands: What Actually Happens Here

Some do: it is a recent import, celebrated strongly in some places and not at all in others.

Halloween is not a traditional Dutch holiday. It arrived through films, shops and student parties, and it is celebrated in a patchy way: strongly by some people and neighbourhoods, barely at all by others in the same street.

What you will actually see on 31 October:

• Costume parties in bars, clubs and student houses, especially in cities with large student populations.
• Decorated houses in some neighbourhoods, often the ones with lots of young families, sometimes organised through a neighbourhood app or a street group.
• Trick-or-treating ("snoep of je leven" in Dutch), but only where a street has agreed to do it. Knocking on random doors will more often get you a confused face than a handful of sweets.
• Halloween events at amusement parks, which run horror programmes through October. Dates and age limits change every year, so check the park's own site rather than a list.

Whether it belongs here is a genuine discussion in the Netherlands, usually framed as an American import crowding out a Dutch tradition. That Dutch tradition is the next one.

The Dutch version of going door to door: children with lanterns sing for sweets.

On the evening of 11 November, children walk from door to door with home-made lanterns, sing a short song at each house and are given sweets. It is the closest thing the Netherlands has to trick-or-treating, and it is far older.

The feast is named after Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier who, according to the story, met a beggar shivering in the cold on a winter night and cut his cloak in two to share it. His feast day is 11 November.

All Souls' Day, Allerzielen, is a Catholic tradition of remembering the dead, so it is strongest in the Catholic south: Noord-Brabant and Limburg. Families visit graves and leave flowers or candles.

Several cemeteries around the country hold light-and-remembrance evenings at the start of November, where the paths are lit and people are invited to walk through. They are open to anyone and are worth knowing about, if only because they are the opposite of everything else in this article: no costumes, no noise, just people walking quietly with candles.

Yes: quieter streets, lit canals and early dark evenings.

Late October and early November is one of the better times to walk a Dutch city centre. It gets dark early, which sounds like a drawback and is not: canals, brick facades and lit windows look better in the dark than in flat summer light, and the crowds have gone home for the year.

Practical points that make the difference:

• Once the clocks go back at the end of October, sunset comes around a quarter past five, and before five by mid-November, so plan the outdoor part of the day early.
• Rain is likely rather than possible. A jacket with a hood beats an umbrella in Dutch wind.
• Cobbles and canal edges get slippery with wet leaves.
• Museums are busier on rainy afternoons than on dry ones. Go in the morning.

If you want a reason to be outside in the dark rather than in a bar, a walking route with something to solve works well in this season. A city game is a self-guided route with puzzles along the way, and the early darkness genuinely adds to it. In Amsterdam, our Ghost Hunters game takes your team past the city's ghost stories, made for exactly these dark evenings. Here is how a game works before you decide.

Dutch autumn holds an imported party, an old children's tradition and a quiet day of remembrance within two weeks of each other. You do not have to choose between them, but knowing which is which explains a lot about what you see out of the window. If you are here with a group and looking for something to do on a dark evening, we help arrange days out for companies and larger groups, and you can ask us anything through the contact page.

Background on the traditions: St. Martin's Day and All Souls' Day on Wikipedia. Sunset times: any Dutch weather service such as the KNMI.