How many people don't know that Halloween is Irish/Scottish in origin?

[pumpkinscake]

Every year I see people on Mumsnet complaining that it's an American thing taking over the UK. But no, we exported it to the US. Doesn't everyone know this? How could you not know this? Clearly people don't know it, but I'm amazed that they don't.

I do know it. But Halloween as practised in England generally is an entirely Americanised version. It's kids in horror movie costumes asking "Trick or Treat" with no concept of that being anything other than random words you say to get sweets.

It's nothing to do with traditional Scottish or Irish guising and I feel completely justified in being uncomfortable with it as an American import that didn't exist in the bits of England I lived in in the 80s and 90s.

I did - sort of. Derry apparently has the largest Halloween/Samhain festival in Europe. Lets face it, they were never likely to celebrate Guy Fawkes.

I also assumed that Halloween was linked to All Souls, which is a major religious festival and a public holiday in parts of Europe. But I may be wrong.

Ok, that's a reasonable view. I've read a lot of posts as not being aware of its origins though.

We did said trick or treat when guising in the 1980s.

I’m Irish and didn’t know Scottish!!! (I had as a child assumed/ thought American)

But the English don’t do it the way we do. They just do the Americanised way.

Though I do get fed up with the amount of English mumsnetters who will sit and argue with us and say it’s nothing to do with the UK and always came from America, like they just don’t want to listen that we’ve done it for hundreds and hundreds of years. I said that once and was told it was bullshit and “guising” isn’t a thing. Nevermind that Kids way back then did dressed up as spirits and went round their village etc.

Most people don’t care 🤣😂😂😂

But saying trick or treat is the American version. That’s her point.

All souls day is a Christian take over of the pagan Samhain, which is Halloween.

Various different forms of Samhain/All Hallows’ Eve were exported to the US from here; but almost none of them remain in their original forms. Hallowe’en in the 1980s in England was not at all like it currently is; and the Scottish and Irish versions of it are and are different again. Modern “Halloween” (largely without the apostrophe!) is almost entirely American; and most of it you see in 2025 has only appeared here for the most part within the last twenty years.

Ahh. Many years ago when I worked in Germany there was a random public holiday in November. I assumed it was All Souls, but in fact it was "Repentance and Prayer Day" (Buß- und Bettag). It seems that Catholic past of Germany celebrate All Souls, but on 2 November.

I grew up with Guy Fawkes, bonfires, penny for the guy and all of that. To me the commercial tat and sugar fest that is Halloween is a poor replacement. I hope the Irish do it better than the Americans.

I have pictures of my dad dressed up for trick or treating in the 60s so it was definitely a think in my part of northern England way back then.

Derry's halloween festival will be running 40 years next year...so definitely longer than 20!

Well, Guy Fawkes is something else entirely, no relationship to Halloween.

All Souls’ Day is actually November 2nd, not Hallowe’en.

Hallowe’en the word comes from “All Hallows’ Eve”, which is the evening before All Saints Day or All Hallows’ Day (1 November). All Souls’ Day is the day after that. Together they are called Allhallowtide. (In Ireland it was sometimes even celebrated at a different time of the year.)

This is an older Orthodox and Catholic tradition established by the pre- and early medieval church right across Western Europe, and largely in places which would not have known of the Celtic tradition of Samhain; so that is also a bit of a myth to be honest. The two festivals ended up overlapping in Ireland, Scotland and the rest of the U.K.; but tenth-century Popes in southern Europe were not really very interested in some obscure and largely unknown (to them) Celtic festival!

Yeah I know the origins but many people don’t. I’ve been trick or treating since the late 70s and been through the tourtue that is trying to carve an old turnip 😆

Yes - if you read my post I say that the modern version of Hallowe’en is largely American, which it is.

The current version of “Halloween” involves the following: pumpkin displays; decorating your house in LED lights, plastic skeletons and tat from Tesco; going to a “pumpkin patch” where the local farmer has bought up a load of cheap pumpkins and strewn them in a field; children traipsing about in all sorts of polyester fancy dress holding orange plastic buckets asking for Haribo; watching Hocus Pocus; putting pics on Instagram of yourself having a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte; and teenagers doing horror movie special effects makeup in “sexy corpse bride” outfits.

None of that is any kind of traditional part of either Celtic or English Hallowe’en.

Halloween has evolved from the Samhain, the celtic new year. It has roots, origins, evolutions in various cultures. But the present day Halloween in the form the most people celebrate it now is certainly different to its origins and is very Americanised.
Personally, I just don’t get why it’s so popular to dress up and ask random strangers for sweets when you spend the other 364 days of the year discouraging your kids from the sort of interaction with people!
I am in a pagan group. We celebrated the festival with a small bonfire, said goodbye to everything that had passed in the year gone, remembered loved ones who have died, and celebrated the year ahead. Simple times.

I think in Ireland there is a straddling between those ideas if Halloween and the traditional Halloween that would have existed for decades. So while my children will wear costumes (like I did in the 80's) we also play Halloween games such as bobbing for apples and will have a Bairín Breac and see who gets the ring. A party after trick or treating would be very common.I will teach the children in my class about the Púca (ghost) and Banshees , the sídhe (fairies ) and old Celtic traditions. But there will also be the movie gore decorations (which I hate personally)

When I was young it was well known that many people (not just those who were more devout Christians) disliked and discouraged the idea of trick or treat because they thought of it as akin to begging.

It wasn’t that trick or treating was unknown: of course people knew about it, and about turnip lantern processions and guising in Scotland. But in England, a fair number of the older generation in particular thought of it as somewhat disreputable.

I grew up in an ordinary town in the north of England. You did occasionally get the odd trick or treater, but they were older teenagers or adults who looked liked they might be up to something! Not small children by any means, and definitely not toddlers and parents.

When we say that modern Hallowe’en is Americanised, it’s all the current stuff we’re thinking of, not older traditions. Remember that pumpkins are a vegetable that only grew in the Americas. Traditional Samhain and European Allhallowtide well predate European voyages to the Americas, and pumpkins had nothing to do with them. You hardly saw them here until quite recently - they aren’t a crop that grows especially well here, for a start. Orange Halloween pumpkins and so on are an entirely American invention!

I grew up in the North in the 1960s. It may have happened but I don’t remember trick or treating. Halloween was definitely a thing although nowhere near as big as November the 5th. Memories of blistered hands from carving rock hard turnips instead of pumpkins and the stink they made with a lit candle inside.

There was no orange plastic tat, or orange anything come to think of it.

Orange Halloween pumpkins and so on are an entirely American invention!

They are but the origin of carving a lantern which is what the pumpkins are comes from the Irish story of Jack O Lantern who made a deal with the devil. When the immigrants went to America in the late 19th century they discovered pumpkins were a lot easier to carve than turnips so it's an adaptation of a tradition.

I feel like people are complaining about the super commercial rampant-consumerism version of Halloween that is definitely an American import rather than saying they think Americans invented Halloween.

In Canada in the 70s we used to say “shell out, shell out, the witches are out”. Does anyone know if that saying has an Irish/ Scottish heritage?

Ah, come on now. The current spend-fest is absolutely an American take-over.