Halloween and Valentine’s Day in Slovakia: new holidays or new opportunities for celebration?

Abstract

This study deals with Halloween and Valentine’s Day in Slovakia from the perspective of the eventisation theory elaborated on by Winfried Gebhardt (2000), which reflects on internal as well as external changes in the field of holidays in modern societies and seeks to elucidate the cultural dimension of the processes of individualisation and pluralisation during the late-modernity period. The authors explore these two holidays as global phenomena with a focus on their holiday practice, i.e. on the ways of celebrating and spending holidays. At the same time, they analyse the historical and social processes related to the transformations of Europe’s and Slovakia’s holiday culture since the end of the 20th century. On this basis, they present research materials that clarify these processes of domestication as well as the ways of celebrating Halloween and Valentine’s Day in Slovakia. The empirical data form the basis for formulating findings on the ways of spending these two “new” holidays and their relationship to the process of eventisation of the holiday culture.