Halloween /Samhain isn't a ghoul-fest

[MarieDeGournay]

I was worried that it was a bit early for my annual rant about the replacement of the traditional Halloween/Samhain festival with an irrelevant import, but I've already spotted pumpkins in shops so here goes!

Halloween as a festival goes back millennia. It marked the gathering in of the harvest, the end of summer, the preparation for the dark time of year. One element of it was the loosening of boundaries between the living and the dead, but it was also a time of celebration, feasting and fun.

The harvest celebration element was preserved for millennia by the practice of children going for house to house asking for 'Any apples or nuts?', the fruits of the autumn, and then having lots of fun eating and playing games with them. One of the traditional games was 'telling the future' using hazelnuts designated 'yes' or 'no' placed near the fire, the first to burst answering questions about the coming year.

Ghost stories were part of the entertainment, but only part of it. It was about fun and the future as well.

The fact that we kept those traditions alive from the time of the Celts was amazing. But in the space of a few years, bang! Trick and treat. Pumpkins. Zombies. Severed heads. Cobwebs. Bats. Giant spiders. Witches. Witches, which are not only derived from Wicca, i.e. a different tradition, but misogynistic as well.

'We' as a society abandoned, without a murmur, distinctive traditions that go back to the Celts, and replaced them with cheap plastic tat derived from american interpretations of Halloween, with a nasty emphasis on horror, zombies, ghoulishness, death and decay.

We allowed Halloween/Samhain to be replaced, in the space of a decade or two. I think it's such a shame we let go of such ancient traditions that were alive and well and enjoyed up to recently.

@flatsevenup - yes! It’s sparklers I was thinking of.

Yes, but the point about Halloween was that it did preserve traditions that go back to the time of the Celts. Samhain was the harvest festival, and apples and nuts were gathered and stored; hazel was used by the Druids for divination, and we used hazel nuts for 'divination'; it was the threshold between the old and new year, when memories of lost loved ones brought them back to mind - or their spirits visited us, to put it another way.
These aspects of Celtic culture are illustrated by contemporaneous descriptions,
archaeological finds etc., so we didn't have to re-imagine them, as some folk traditions were re-imagined... or even just made up!

What gets to me - and it really does get to me in a very irrational and emotional way - is that we kept echoes of those Celtic traditions alive for the best part of 3,000 years, and then in the space of a few decades, discarded them.

There are worse things in the world to worry about, obviously, but actually observing the death of millennia-old traditions in my lifetime is difficult.

Have we discarded them @MarieDeGournay ?

Yes there are many additions now but
nuts are still very much associated with Halloween as are a variety of games with apples.

The kids go out trick or treating then come back to the house for party games here ( bobbing for apples, apple on a string, grape on flour etc).

Dressing up at Halloween isn't a new thing...at least not new in the sense of the last couple of decades at least. I'm heading for 60 and some of my earliest memories include dressing up for Halloween as a witch ( homemade hat and binbag outfit and mask from the local shop).
I lived in a very rural area btw.

I do know what you mean @MarieDeGournay . A few years ago I splashed out on that magnum opus of Máire MacNeill : The Festival of Lughnasa. It's a massive treasure trove of old customs. €50 from Liam Ruiséal bookshop Cork- which is no more alas. I wish she'd had time to write books on Bealtaine and Imbolc too. A shorter book for the general reader is The Year in Ireland by Kevin Danaher.

I also take your point about the witch thing. No disrespect to pagans but witches weren't a thing here. The Cailleach is a hag or crone , with the wisdom of the ages. The Bean Feasa is a woman of knowledge.

Witch trials here - few enough thank goodness- were mainly in the Pale. Like Alice le Kyteler in Kilkenny. The last such trial was in Carrickfergus, where the accusers and their would be victims were Scottish Presbyterians . Sorry I'm rambling and you probably know all this !

Those books sound really interesting @Abhannmor. Thanks for mentioning them.

My point was that dressing up as witches for Halloween isn't something that's happened within the last decade or two - the timescale mentioned in the OP. I'm not sure when it started but I know I did so as a small child in the early 70s.

I agree the holiday has become so much more commercialised recently, along with other holidays. Decorating for Easter was never a thing when I was younger but it is now. I hate the ghoulishness and goryness often depicted at Halloween...we avoid that as a family as much as possible.

Fair enough. I never saw it in the 60s. Just my mam dressing up as a banshee. A bedsheet was her only prop but we were scared!

Tell us some Manx greetings or sayings @BenFoillan !

I love this thread. The older traditions of halloween/Samhain sound wonderful, esp the divination games, going to try some of them this year with my daughter.

Happy to - do you mean generally or around Hop-Yu-Naa and the festivals?

Generally. A friend once lent me Shkeelin Vannin- a book a CD of Manx people recorded in the 1940s. I could only make out bits of it tbh. But it sounded so familiar if you've heard Irish spoken

https://www.duchas.ie/en

The National Folklore collection is searchable - lots of Irish Halloween here.

De Valera supported the collection of Manx folklore and recordings of Manx

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/isleofman/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8483000/8483578.stm

Irish 'Taeshoch' according to the BBC

Well I can assure you that it wasn’t like that everywhere. I experienced both Suffolk and London. In the 60s and 70s there were fields of pumpkins for the US forces to celebrate Thanksgiving and people bought them to decorate for Halloween. Turnips and swedes were hollowed out for lanterns and they could be really scarey, in both places. We certainly knew about Halloween and we weren’t an exception

We used to make witches hats at school for Halloween in the 70's

I watched some YouTube videos a while back of a Manx school and it was easy to get the gist of what they were saying as it's very similar to Irish

Pumpkins and US forces suddenly explains something that has puzzled me for half a century. Growing up in Norfolk in the 60s and 70s no-one else did Halloween (though it sometimes appeared in comics). I have a birthday near it, and my Mayo grandmother used to send me a barmbrack as a birthday present and I'd have a dressing up Halloween + birthday party - apples and nuts, brack, witches hats, a turnip lantern. No trick or treat.
Then ca 1970 one of my mother's teaching colleagues, who also had a smallholding, started growing pumpkins. I never knew why, and the local greengrocer (and enterprising vegetarian) never stocked them. But growing them specifically for US forces makes total sense.

Oh, and the grower was selling them in the staffroom specifically for previously unknown-in-Norfolk Halloween. They seemed so exotic.

Have you ever visited Islandmagee?

I have and it’s one of the most creepy places I’ve ever been.

I was brought up Catholic in London in the 80's, definitely celebrated Halloween ( and yes had to go to church the next day) dressing up, apple bobbing, apple peel over the shoulder, some game with a plate of flour and picking up a sweet with your teeth, eating party rings off the washing line. So at least 40 years of tradition here.

Never been to Islandmagee. Defo on my bucket list now . Americans also brought Geno Washington and his Ram Jam Band to Norfolk lest we forget!

To be honest there’s nothing really there. Just a very dark creepy feeling hanging over it all. I didn’t like it.

I suppose the Gobbins Cliff Path is a bit of a tourist attraction.

I do remember watching a kids TV show in England called Blue Peter. They would have a ' what is Halloween' 🦇 item most years. I'm sure the traditions were observed in parts of England. And of course Scotland and Man as noted above. But I was living in Essex and had to explain it to my classmates. They thought it was a bit pointless because they would be doing 'penny for the Guy' stuff that week anyway. Bonfire Night was the big thing then.

"I've managed to carve a turnip quite successfully in recent years using a Parisian cutter/melon baller"

We got given cattle hoof paring knives. I've still got a faint scar on my little finger.

This could be posted on the wanky things thread.

Having proper tools for the job isn't really wanky, nor is adapting them for novel purposed.

That was a really weird thread - were any of them serious, or just making up the most ridiculous things they could think of?

@MarieDeGournay I'm prepared to make an exception for witches, because I remember dressing up as a witch in the '70s and early '80s. And of course, it tied in well with the availability of black sacks😀.

I take your point otherwise. But we can't turn back time and uninvent TV and the internet. Who's going to tell their small kids that they can't dress up as Batman or a Disney princess, because it's not traditional? And very few kids would be happy with a handful of monkey nuts when they could have a handful of funsize chocolate bars and lollipops. Maybe a better way of looking at it is to say that we have managed to maintain Hallowe'en as a celebration. And not only maintain it, but we have helped to spread it around the world (to be fair, TV helped a lot too). Sure, lots of elements have changed but the essence of it is the same. My brothers and sisters and I totally embraced Hallowe'en as kids and we've made sure to pass it down to the next generation. Although DD never took to colcannon.

I steer clear of evil clowns and axe murderers and associated decorations though.

@DeanElderberry we always had wine apples at Hallowe'en. I read about a fruit called pomegranate in books. I only discovered relatively recently that it's the same fruit.