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.

Yes — that’s why I mentioned turnip lanterns in my post. It’s an Americanised holiday, especially in England.

Celtic was much wider than Scotland/Ireland though. There were Celtic parts of England, Wales, France and Spain.

Does anyone know if there are north//south differences in England?

Growing up in the south in 80s/90s we sometimes had kids Halloween parties (apple bobbing etc) with very home made costumes but didn’t go trick or treating. It was very low key and teens and adults didn’t dress up. I remember going to NYC at Halloween when I was about 22 and seeing adults dressed up on the subway and at a big Halloween party, plus all the decorations and stuff in the shops — it was absolutely crazy. & mind blowing!

My DH claims in the NW he went trick or treating, Halloween was always a big deal and as a teen & at uni there were always Halloween parties where everyone dressed up!

I think lots of people understand Hallowe'en has old origins, one of the many pre-Christian traditions over-written by the Christian calendar.

But a few decades ago, the event in the UK was about more home-made mischief / guising and turnip lanterns, focused on kids and more minor than bonfire night.

The recent bigging-up of Hallowe'en is definitely American though, represented in American movies and TV first of all. Where you get all the households competing with plastic decorations and whole families dressing up and 'trick-or-treating' with sweets is the American version of guising. The other side of it with younger adults in costume for a party night out on the town is reminiscent of similar American costume parades / parties.

This more commercial, consumer-based Hallowe'en is what people mean by Americanised. And of course the pumpkins: definitely the U.S. tradition.

I grew up in the NW in the 80s/90s and our Hallowe’en was exactly the same as yours. Bonfire Night was a much bigger deal.

The turnip ones were scarier imho.You’d take your hand off trying to carve them all right though.

This is a plaster cast of one carved in Donegal and later donated to a museum in the early 1940s by a local woman who feared the custom of carving them was dying out.

My DH, who is older than me, says that when he was young in the NW, they had Halloween with turnip lanterns and even fancy dress parties at school. There was no Trick or treat as that didn't come in until the 1980s, influenced by American films. I went trick or treating but that was after that in the 90s.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in the rural SW. Halloween wasn't a 'thing' until about aged 10/11, when a couple of families did a ghost walk and trick or treat. Was great fun but a one-off, and every family was prepped - as a one off.

Every year was Bonfire Night, that was the big celebration.

We definitely trick or treated here (london) in the 80’s/90’s!

But we had tricks - kids don’t do that anymore thankfully!

Well of course rheee wa always tat. There was less tat for Christmas and Easter too, but the basics of what we have for Halloween today are all there, even if it was a turnip instead of a pumpkin and people got given apples instead of sweets. Every aspect of life has been more commercialised since then. Dad would get a satsuma and a few small gifts for Christmas. Now kids get piles and piles of plastic toys

I know because a Scottish relative whinges every year that they were doing it first, it's all commercialised now, blah blah.

This

No, it’s clear from various threads over the years that some people do think Halloween in its entirety is an American import. They don’t know about its more local origins.

All the complaining about Halloween being an American "spendfest" really irritates me. You wouldn't talk about anyone else's culture like that.

I grew up in the US and British people's idea of American Halloween is really skewed.

When I was a kid in NY, Halloween was a lovely community event. Everyone decorated their houses and dressed up. Costumes tended to be inventive and fun. Going house to house wasn't "begging" as everyone was doing it. People sometimes gave fruit instead of sweets, although we were cautioned against accepting it after a panic about someone supposedly putting razor blades in apples.

I find here, people do a very commercial, watered down version of Halloween and then blame "the Americans".

It’s clearly been taken over by the USA and exported back here! Whoever saw a pumpkin 60 years ago? 31 October came and went. No one did anything but firework night was special! Lots of fun making a guy and choosing fireworks.

I’m in Ireland and we certainly celebrated Halloween years ago! Turnips instead of pumpkins but pumpkins are definitely the easier choice for carving and are more colourful. That’s why they’re mostly used now they’re widely available.

We don’t celebrate Guy Fawkes at all for obvious reasons. Not sure if it’s celebrated (by some communities) in Northern Ireland.

There was definitely trick or treating in the 70s/80s in the NW. But you were asked to earn your treat when you knocked on anyone's door - sing or tell a joke or something, from memory. I don't remember people buying lots of sweets in to give out so the treats would be random things you had in the house - fruit, biscuits and probably a few pennies if you didn't have anything. If the trick or treaters were disappointed with their treat, houses would get egged.

And, yes, the turnip/swede latterns were scarier. We had apples on strings and duck apple/apple bobbing.

It's fucking tedious.
As is 'it's father Christmas not Santa claus!'.
And debates over 'it's a cob/roll/buttery'.
Also faux naivety when someone uses a regional colloquialism, I saw a thread earlier where the OP referred to 'jags' rather than jabs. Quite obvious what was meant but flooded with people pretending to be confused about what jag referred to.

We've always celebrated Halloween in Scotland and it irks me when people claim it's not a UK thing just because it's not been done in their part of the UK. The rest of us do exist and have our own traditions.

Just because something isn't done exactly as it was were you grew up/live does not mean everyone else is doing it wrong, and acting like it does makes you look small minded and parochial.

I don’t know. All I can say is that I’m Irish and have been celebrating Halloween since the 70s and I’ve never heard that expression before. ‘Shell out’ wouldn’t really be very widely used as an expression where I am anyway, though I’ve heard it used sometimes. But never in a Halloween related saying, no.
Just my personal experience though.

You are correct. November the 1st is Allhallows, or All Saints Day in the Christian calendar, a day for honouring saints and martyrs. The word Halloween is derived from being on the eve of Allhallows.

Hence the dislike many devout Christians have for all the witches and horror-based stuff that comes out on Halloween.

You’re being dim. Halloween as it now is a bastardised version and has nothing to do with its origins. Most educated people are not referring to Samhain when they diss Halloween.

But people did do things 60 years ago. Sure we had turnips instead of pumpkins but it was still a thing in lots of parts of the UK.

They usually misunderstand the traditional reason behind dressing up though. It was a camouflage as a protection against malevolent spirits, not an embracing of evil which they seem to assume.

But if we said we were 'guising' we'd be accused or ripping off the Irish and Scottish 😂 The English can't win.

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeons even more, so to speak, there’s a strong likelihood that late Victorian anthropologists either invented or massively overplayed the original roots of Hallowe’en as part of Samhain (largely due to James Frazer, the famous Scottish author of The Golden Bough, who had a vested interest in bigging up the importance of Celtic mythology and folk mythology of the occult). Much of the Scottish and Celtic “traditional” version of Hallowe’en most probably dates back no earlier than the start of the twentieth century.