Friday, 31 October 2025

c’est l’halloween (12. 841)

Reported by Stop Podcasting Yourself’s Dave Shumka, we learn about the greatest French language seasonal song ever, written by language immersion teacher Matt Maxwell in Halifax to teach his young pupils about the then mostly exclusively Anglophone tradition and acquire some vocabulary in a fun way. Notwithstanding thematic and lyrical similarities to the Jack Skellington number from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a more modern carol but still losing out in terms of popularity—according to recent and perennial polling to Monster Mash among Americans at least (like “Dominick the Donkey” for the latter holiday), it’s still of a shouty banger. Although a word of foreign origin, the Office Québécois de la Langue Française still prescribes adding an article which leads to elision and a silent h.