We celebrated Hallowe'en with gusto when I was a child. I must admit, I was a bit taken aback at the sneeriness about Hallowe'en I have encountered on MN over the years and I was also rather amused to see it described as a tacky American tradition.
In the days leading up to Hallowe'en, we would do Hallowe'en arts and crafts at school - we might make a witch's hat or a cat or paint a Hallowe'en picture to hang in our window at home. We made a turnip lantern once but it took forever - turnips are really hard to carve. We learnt about Hallowe'en traditions at school. We'd also learn Irish words associated with Hallowe'en - Samhain obviously but also words like taibhse (ghost), tine cnámh (bonfire) and cailleach (witch).
We dressed up for Hallowe'en but they didn't sell costumes in the shops at that stage, so we made them ourselves. They were very simple costumes. We might dress up as a witch, using the hat we made at school and borrowing a broom from the kitchen. Or we'd make a ghost costume by cutting eye holes out of a sheet don't tell Mam or she'll kill us. My brother was usually a farmer (he'd borrow Dad's big boots) or a coalman (he'd rub coal all over his face). In later years, plastic face masks appeared in the shops.
The shops had very impressive fruit displays at Hallowe'en and Mam always bought extra fruit, along with monkey nuts and mixed nuts and a coconut. There were some unusual things we didn't see the rest of the year, like wine apples and toffee apples. I reckon I was in my thirties before I realized that wine apples and pomegranates were the same fruit.
On the day itself, we'd be soooo excited. If we were at school that day, we'd spend ages discussing what costumes we planned to wear, even though 95% of the girls were dressing up as witches. Mam always cooked colcannon at Hallowe'en - potato mashed with kale and onion. She'd wrap up coins in tin foil and hide them in the colcannon. As soon as it got dark, we'd get changed into our costumes and head outside. The air would be very smoky from bonfires and there would be fireworks whizzing around everywhere. We'd knock at doors and say, "Please help the Hallowe'en party". We'd get monkey nuts and the occasional mandarin or a small apple. The local shopkeeper gave us a free tenpenny bag of sweets.
When we came home, we'd eat some of the monkey nuts and fruit and sweets (from the shop) and then we'd play party games. Dad would hang apples from the top of the door with a shoelace or length of wool. He'd put some coins into slits in the apple. We had to put our hands behind our backs and try to extract the coins with our teeth. We also had a go at bobbing for apples. Dad would put two or three apples into a bowl of water and we had to try and take a bite out of one. Your face and hair would get wet but sure, that was all part of the fun. There was also a game that involved putting a mound of flour on a plate, with a grape in the middle. Everyone would take turns at cutting off a 'slice' of flour, working their way in from the edges. Eventually the grape would fall off and the person responsible would get their face dunked in the remaining flour. There was another game called Long John Silver but I'm a a bit hazy on the details. You'd be blindfolded and you'd be told you were being taken to meet a pirate called Long John Silver. You'd be told to have a feel of his wooden leg (a sweeping brush) and his lost eye (a grape) etc. As a small kid, you'd be nearly believing there was an actual pirate in the room.
We'd eat some of the mixed nuts. Dad would try breaking them with a hammer but they'd fly all over the room and we'd find some of them weeks later, when we'd be doing the big Christmas clean up. We'd drink some of the coconut milk but it was nowhere near as nice as we'd been led to believe by eating Bounty bars. We'd also have slices of barm brack with butter and there would be great excitement about who'd get the ring. Eventually bedtime would roll around and we'd reluctantly toddle off to bed.