On Saturday, 31 October 2026, the Netherlands will celebrate Halloween the way it has for about a quarter century: unevenly. At Walibi Holland in Biddinghuizen, a clown called Dirigent Eddie will run the evening shift. On certain suburban streets, children dressed as Spider-Man will ring doorbells. Eleven days later, on Wednesday 11 November, many of the same children will come back with paper lanterns and sing for sweets again. In Den Bosch, about 100,000 adults will pack the city centre in costume to mark the start of carnival.
The Dutch calendar has no shortage of autumn costume-and-candy rituals. Halloween is the newest and, in the eyes of many Dutch people, the least necessary.
A late arrival
The country knew Halloween by reputation long before it practised it. DutchNews found a 1901 article in the Provinciale Overijsselsche describing pranks and apple bobbing in Kansas. Practice came much later. Tamar Bosschaart, a Canadian who moved to Amsterdam in 2000, found the city’s only Halloween party underwhelming and began organizing her own at the comedy club Boom Chicago. By her count she ran 20 parties and seven festivals. Outside Amsterdam, according to the same report, Halloween events were hard to find until well into the 2010s, apart from theme parks.
The numbers then moved fast. In 2017 Ineke Strouken, former director of the national intangible heritage centre, counted more than 1,000 Halloween events, up from about 680 the year before. Sophie Elpers of the Meertens Instituut attributed part of it to globalization. Strouken added a second reason: a fascination with death that Halloween lets people experience at close range. At that point Halloween was not on the national heritage inventory, which already included Sinterklaas.
Strouken has since recanted an old prediction. In the 1990s she thought Halloween would not catch on. In 2025 she told NH Nieuws she had to take that back.
Resistance is real. DutchNews readers described Halloween as an invasive species that offends doe normaal (act normal) and gezellig (cosy). One Amsterdam designer, Ben Farrell, argued that the Netherlands lacks “dark, old things in its bones”. The rest of this piece suggests otherwise. The Dutch have dark nights. They scheduled them elsewhere.
There may also be a ceiling. A recent NOS report found some retailers seeing weaker presales after a post-Covid boom, though marketing professor Maarten Gijsenberg called it premature to declare a decline.
Where it happens
| Where | What happens |
|---|---|
| Walibi Holland, Biddinghuizen | Evening Fright Nights with scare actors; Walibi had run it for 17 years by 2017. Daytime Spooky Days for small children |
| Toverland, Sevenum | Halloween Nights |
| Amsterdam | Club parties and a parade billed at more than 15,000 partygoers |
| Standdaarbuiten | Terror Nights, run by more than 150 volunteers |
| Zoetermeer | Bills itself as the country’s Halloween capital |
| Suburban streets | Trick-or-treating, from Wassenaar and a Utrecht suburb to a street in Breda |
Private zeal fills the gaps. In 2020, René and Michaela Coumans of Koningslust, Limburg, turned their house and garden into a Halloween set. The idea came from a 2007 trip to America, where neighbours were decorating their yards. They took thirteen years to act on it.
Sint Maarten, the incumbent
The strongest reason Halloween took so long is that the Dutch already had a door-to-door candy holiday. On 11 November, children carry lanterns and sing, and the best-known song asks, in effect, for sweets on behalf of the cows’ tails and the girls’ skirts, as recorded in a Rijksmuseum photo caption.
Strouken traces the older form. Until the 1920s, the feast marked the start of the bad season, winter. The poor went through richer neighbourhoods begging for money and fruit, a kind of informal poor relief. Bonfires burned with music, food and drink. After the First World War it became a children’s lantern parade, and candy replaced fruit and coins. In Groningen, the lantern of choice is hollowed from a fodder beet, a close cousin of the jack-o’-lantern’s turnip.
The celebration is also regionally chaotic. When 11 November fell on a Sunday in 2018, NOS reported that schools and local shopkeepers set the evening. Overijssel and Drenthe mostly chose Sunday, Groningen and Friesland Saturday, and the city of Groningen split across three evenings. Utrecht, whose patron saint he is, treats him more seriously. His celebration there was among the first three traditions placed on the national heritage inventory.
A 2018 poll for Hart van Nederland found that 47 percent in Limburg, Noord-Holland, Drenthe, Friesland and Groningen took part in Sint Maarten, against 9 percent elsewhere. Sixty-three percent wanted the tradition kept. Ten percent preferred Halloween.
Strouken draws the dividing line at purpose. Sint Maarten is about looking after others, giving and receiving. Halloween is a feast of the dead, built for frights, and she adds that it doubles as a flirting night, a meidenmarkt (girls’ market). The two coexist without much friction.
Eleven-eleven, the costumed one
In Noord-Brabant, most families skip Sint Maarten, probably because 11 November already belongs to carnival. At 11:11 the season opens, and the costumes come out. According to experts quoted by Omroep Brabant, the date was the end of the farming year. Medieval people fasted twice a year, before 11 November and after carnival. The date falls forty days before the winter solstice, so it works as a mirror image of Lent. In the words of one expert, Van Geest, it is a kind of small carnival. The prince announced that day is, as Van Geest puts it, the chief fool.
The fire went out of the old date, then came back. Carnival historian Rob van de Laar says 11-11 used to be an indoor affair for devotees. In 2011 the Oeteldonksche Club moved it outside, with free coffee and pea soup, borrowing a call-and-response ritual from Bergen op Zoom. In Den Bosch, the uniform is a blue smock. Limburg dresses more formally.
The dead on 1 and 2 November
Catholic regions keep Allerheiligen (1 November) and Allerzielen (2 November) more quietly, with white chrysanthemums on graves. A Brabant florist told Omroep Brabant the habit is dying, because younger people no longer know what the days are. Halloween’s critics tend to treat it as the invader that killed this custom. The florist’s account suggests it was already fading.
The night that moved to midwinter
Strouken’s most useful remark is almost an aside. Every culture, she says, has a feast where the line between living and dead blurs. In the Netherlands, that was the time between Christmas and New Year. Today it has disappeared.
One survivor is the midwinter horn. In Twente, the Achterhoek, the Veluwe and southeast Drenthe, wooden horns sound from the first Sunday of Advent to Epiphany. Scholars suggest early uses included driving off evil spirits, and the earliest Dutch written record dates to 1485. Erik Brouwer, chairman of a Noord-Holland blowing club, adds that smugglers once used it as a warning signal, which got it banned for a time. Its older purposes included chasing off spirits and calling the light back.
A town where nobody was a witch
For Halloween witches, there is Oudewater. The town’s weigh house obtained Emperor Charles V’s right in 1545 to weigh suspected witches on its scales, and it issued a Certificaet van Weghinge to those who passed. The museum says no one was ever condemned there. A skeptical account suggests the town may simply have wanted the fees. Whichever is true, the scales are still there, and visitors can be weighed and certified.
The 2026 calendar
| Date | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sat 31 October | Halloween | Theme parks, cities, suburban streets |
| Sun 1 and Mon 2 November | Allerheiligen, Allerzielen | Catholic south, cemeteries |
| Wed 11 November | Sint Maarten and Elfde van de Elfde | North and Utrecht; Brabant and Limburg |
| 29 November to 6 January | Midwinterhoornblazen | Twente, Achterhoek, Veluwe, southeast Drenthe |
Farrell is right that Halloween is not Dutch. He is wrong that the Dutch lack the instinct. They have a night of begging, one of masks, one for the dead and one for noise. Halloween’s novelty is mostly that it puts them in October, on a Saturday, with a ticket.
Sources
- NOS, Halloween: even omkleden (2017)
- DutchNews, Has Halloween invaded Holland? (2022)
- DutchNews, Thirteen tips for celebrating Halloween (2024)
- NH Nieuws, Gaat Halloween Sint-Maarten vervangen? (2025)
- NOS, Stagneert de hype rond Halloween?
- IamExpat, Special Halloween events
- Fijnuit, Halloween uitjes
- Hart van Nederland, Koningslust (2020)
- Hart van Nederland, Sint Maarten poll (2018)
- NOS, Sint-Maarten kan vandaag zijn (2018)
- NOS, Immaterieel erfgoed op lijst
- Rijksmuseum, Sint-Maarten photo caption
- Kidsproof, Sint Maarten (Amersfoort) and (Den Bosch)
- Omroep Brabant, Voordat we gingen hossen
- Omroep Brabant, Waarom de Elfde van de Elfde zo populair is
- Omroep Brabant, Elfde van de Elfde 2025
- Omroep Brabant, Witte chrysanten
- KIEN, Midwinterhoornblazen
- U Today, Echoes of winter
- NH Nieuws, Midwinterhoornspelers
- Museum de Heksenwaag
- Fietsnetwerk, Museum de Heksenwaag
- Culture Trip, Oudewater
