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Hallow'een humbugs help!

6 replies

QuickBrown · 01/11/2025 22:46

Hello. I'm a Hallow'een humbug in that I've never really understood it or got into it as a celebration. It seems to have become a bigger part of English culture (I know it's always been big in some parts of the UK) and I'm trying to understand why I feel uncomfortable with it because it isn't going to go away! I don't really understand Hallow'een or my feelings about it. Maybe there are others out there who might be willing to share insight.

Some context about me. I'm newly diagnosed autistic. I grew up in a staunch Christian house and was of very strong faith until my early 30s. At mid 40s I'm an atheist with a strong belief that there is no afterlife.

When I was younger I didn't like Hallow'een because I was scared of messing with evil spirits. I attended All Saints Day and All Souls Day services. It scared me that there were souls that wouldn't get to heaven. I understand to a degree people wanting to play with ouija boards or commune with spirits, there is a logic there. I don't really understand people who aren't wanting to do that pretending this stuff. I understand carving pumpkins or turnips. I don't understand plastic pumpkins or what spiders have to do with any of it. Or when gore and blood started getting involved!

I'm starting to think this might be an autistic thing, and I just don't understand the rules of Hallow'een. Opinions welcome.

OP posts:
thecatfromneptune · 01/11/2025 23:09

Most of the current U.K. Hallowe’en “traditions” are pretty recent, and imported from the US at some point in the last twenty years.

I’m in my forties and when I was growing up, little kids (under tens) got dressed up as a cat, a witch or a ghost, and maybe had a small children’s party with apple bobbing and biscuits/cakes decorated with spiders or whatnot. Even the pumpkin thing wasn’t a big thing here (historically it was turnips here way back when, not so much pumpkins, which are more of a New World crop). I knew about US-style Halloween (minus the apostrophe!) from films like ET, and from Peanuts cartoon strips and so on, but in the 1980s in England there wasn’t any trick or treating where I lived (my parents certainly wouldn’t have thought it was safe, and lots of people still disapproved of it because they thought it was too much like begging); and adults most definitely didn’t “do” Hallowe’en or put up decorations and so on. If you had a pumpkin it was a smaller, darker orange eating one, so your mum kept all the insides to make soup with! In fact, Bonfire night was then generally a much bigger deal than Hallowe’en.

(I’m aware of course that in some parts of the U.K. and Scotland guising and turnip lanterns is a much more longstanding and elaborate tradition.)

People started doing more US-style Hallowe’ens around the millennium and after that - supermarkets in particular started selling lots of cheap plastic Hallowe’en stuff, cheap kids’s costumes, huge tubs of sweets, and job lots of those cheap specially grown giant non-eating pumpkins that are just sold for carving and decorations and get thrown away afterwards. (People would have been horrified at that, in the 1980s where I grew up in the north of England - so wasteful!) Plus people didn’t buy loads of cheap kids’ fancy dress costumes in those days -- if you dressed up you put your black school leotard on with some cardboard ears to be a cat, or your mum’s black skirt and a black cardboard cone on your head to be a witch…the big influx of cheap stuff made in Asia and shipped over to be sold in huge amounts in big supermarkets just didn’t exist then.

I was quite shocked at the “new Hallowe’en” when I had my daughter a few years ago. I’ve come round to the idea of very little kids going around the neighbourhood at 5pm for a few sweets; but I still don’t like the commercialism of it all, the waste (so much plastic tat), and the “horror movie” aesthetic that it seems to have acquired, blood, gore etc.

I think it only really got like this because it became a big moneymaker in the 2000s for shops to import and flog very cheap disposable tat made overseas in poor working conditions. I think it’s okay to dislike it, and lots of people do. I feel quite fond of the apple bobbing and dressing up like a witch in homemade outfits kind of Hallowe’en of my youth, but it’s current incarnation could disappear entirely and I wouldn’t miss it for a second. —Oh and though I’m not autistic, I’m also an atheist; I’ve been joining in with it all for ten+ years while my daughter has been young, but I still dislike it and don’t think disliking it is necessarily about not getting the rules; you can dislike it for all sorts of other valid reasons!

QuickBrown · 01/11/2025 23:23

Thank you, yes I agree people can dislike it for different reasons, I just can't figure out what mine is!
I always thought of apple bobbing as a 5th November thing but I might have mixed that up.
I assumed that pumpkin insides were edible, a bit like butternut squash, and you'd use it for soup or risotto (not that anyone fed me risotto in the 80s!)
Yes I hate disposable tat, I was quite old before I learned that people can have stylish Christmas trees, I thought it was only for hotels and shops, and actual people has a mismatch featuring handicrafts made over the decades!
I like your reference to "new hallowe'en" as it has definitely changed over the years. It is now like world book day on sugar!

OP posts:
thecatfromneptune · 01/11/2025 23:30

On the few occasions we got a pumpkin for Hallowe’en (mainly in the 90s), they were still the edible kind and my mum definitely cooked with the insides. But the current ones that get sold in supermarkets for Hallowe’en are poor quality ones which are grown cheaply and fast, and they’re big, but they generally aren’t edible -- the flesh is tough and pale and doesn’t cook well. I hate buying them just to chuck the insides and then the rest of it away!

Agree about world book day on sugar! But I don’t much like the horror movie costumes. There was a fashion a few years ago for teenagers to do really elaborate horror movie makeup of wounds and flayed skin which I really didn’t like around the very little kids.

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SammyScrounge · 01/11/2025 23:37

I'm aware that in some parts of the U.K. guising and turnip lanterns is a much more longstanding tradition).

Correct! It has always.been a.big festival in Scotland. We used to dress up as char ladies, hair hidden under a scarf, a long overall,..soot from the chimney all over our faces. - spirits couldn't recognise us then. A hollowed out turnip.carved with a demon face had a lit candle inside. All the closes smelled of scorched turnip!
None of this trick or treat stuff. Children in the fifties were more polite than now. We would knock on doors and say, "Please for my Hallowe'en". The householder would let us in and we sang songs or recited a poem or did a wee dance for them.
Then the sweets were dropped in our bags and maybe a sixpence and an orange as a reward for putting on a good show.
The old lady at the corner was a popular destination. She loved Halloween and children entertaining and used to clap and sing with us. Then she would produce
trays of tablet she'd made herself and wrap bars.of it in greaseproof paper.
. for us to take away.

mathanxiety · 02/11/2025 00:37

Hallowe'en is very much an Irish thing as well as Scottish. As a child in the 70s we used to create papier mache masks in art class in school, and make or put together a costume - I had a witch mask most years, and a succession of black bin bag costumes, along with a hat bought somewhere. We used to traipsing around the neighbourhood knocking on doors for apples and nuts. We would end up with very bruised apples and lots of peanuts, walnuts, almonds, etc. Dad would crack open the nuts when we got home, and mum would take the apples and eventually make stewed apples, apple crumble, or apple fool.

Then there was a scare in the US about apples with razor blades inserted in them by psychos who hated children, people became more aware of food allergies too, and people were urged to only give or keep wrapped treats. Nuts and ibv peanuts fell out of fashion and apples and anything home made got discarded. Small size wrapped sweets were ideal as you knew what was in them, and you knew they hadn't been tampered with.

The economy of Europe in general grew, and manufacturing in Asia took off, meaning people had money to spend on festivals.like Hallowe'en, buy cheap (almost disposable) costumes, and make a big day of it. At the same time, movies with Hallowe'en and American TV shows presented an attractive vision of the possibilities of the holiday. Trick or treating crossed the Atlantic, along with other holiday ideas like decorating your house. Trick or treating is the same basic idea as the time honoured traditions of Ireland and Scotland.

OP, I do feel that some of your questions and puzzlement spring from autism. In fact, I wondered if you were a friend of mine (diagnosed with autism in her 30s) who feels the same way about Hallowe'en and other festivals.

Hallowe'en was traditionally a time between seasons at the end of the warm and light filled part of the year, when darkness and cold descended on the northern hemisphere, and the dormancy and scarcity of winter lay ahead. In ancient Irish (and possibly Scottish) tradition, it was a time when the veil between life and death became 'thin' and people remembered their ancestors. It was always a time when people considered the cycles of life and death. Traditions of spirits wandering and visiting their old homes led to disguises, wandering from house to house, and offerings of food, with agricultural products like turnips carved to represent the spirits of the dead. There were traditions involving games of divination too. The feast of Samhain also included the lighting of fires, both in individual hones and as a community event. When I was a child the neighbours used to gather for a big community bonfire in a local park after we were all finished gathering our Hallowe'en booth. A hilly peninsula a few miles away was the site of a massive bonfire every year (still is). There has been a revival of pre-Christian Hallowe'en festivities in Ireland recently, which has taken place alongside the Advent of trick or treating, pumpkins, and other innovations.

The Christian element of the season is the feast of All Saints and the feast of All Souls. As a family back in the day, and even now, we always combined the traditional and the RC All Hallows celebrations. All Saints Day is usually a holy day of obligation (to attend Mass). One of my DDs had a friend (in the US) whose devout Baptist mother shunned Hallowe'en because she believed it was a celebration of Satan's birthday, but the focus on the dead and the global fascination with cycles of life and death are ancient and universal (see Dia de Los Muertos and various other ancient feasts all around the world), that Christianity saw as an ideal instinct to use as a means of teaching about salvation and the promise of eternal life.

All the stuff about ouija boards and dabbling in the occult, and many of the basic premises of horror movies are not specifically related to Hallowe'en at all. I personally would never engage with any of that, or tarot readings, etc. But I have no qualms about the usual Hallowe'en festivities.

mathanxiety · 02/11/2025 00:44

Sorry for so many typos - autocorrect fought me too.

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