It’s the 31st October and All Hallows Eve is upon us – that autumn evening of trick-or-treating, small ghouls, ghosties, vampires and witches roaming the streets on the lookout for pumpkins, with their glimmering candles carefully positioned in front windows to signal that the inhabitants have a store of treats on offer.
For many years I only registered Halloween as an opportunity for the big retailers to sell yet more piles of plastic tat to a gullible public. Every year, long after the end of October, baskets of remaindered witches’ hats and vampire masks still lurk in obscure corners of my local supermarket, on offer at knock-down prices.
A festival with an added frisson of spookiness
And yet… having two young granddaughters has started to open my eyes to the attractions of the festival – for a festival it is for them, packed with fun and excitement plus the added frisson of spookiness. This year, anticipation has been growing for several weeks, with earnest discussions about costume design and trick-or-treating routes. Whose house in the village might be guaranteed to yield up generous handouts of sweets, and whose should they avoid?
I have become skilled in spotting trends in the popularity of certain disguises, with the traditional witches and ghost costumes giving way more recently to Harry Potter-themed Dementors and Voldemorts. I have yet to see a Lord of the Rings, Sauron or Black Rider – perhaps parents feel that that is taking the literary theme a little too far.
When quizzed by a puzzled grandparent about what made Halloween so special for them, eight-year-old Lauris and Sylvie, five, both agreed that dressing up and going out trick-or-treating in the dark was a big part of it. Collecting lots of sweets came high on the list, as well as carving pumpkins and having lots of friends round. Asked how it compared with Christmas, Lauris said that she liked both festivals about equally, although in different ways, and Sylvie – ever the pragmatist – had a slight preference for Christmas, for, as she explained, “the presents that you get at Christmas don’t go off”, unlike the sweets collected at Halloween.
Comparing Halloween with Christmas
Comparing Halloween with Christmas, Lauris explained that “one was outdoors and one indoors”. It was a wonderfully simple analysis of what, I realised, made the event such fun and so special for both parents and children – the involvement of so many in the community. As Bruce Smeath describes in his 2021 article for Sussex Bylines, “Trick or Treat – a Halloween Epiphany”, the rituals of Halloween take you out of your house and into the community, connecting with neighbours you might never have met before. In contrast, Christmas Day, which in times long past would have been a time of feasting, games and play-acting when the whole community came together to mark the birth of Christ, nowadays, in our increasingly secular society, is more likely to be celebrated within the home by individual families.
But it appears that the spirit of community celebration – sometimes turbulent and unruly, sometimes joyful – is difficult to suppress. In Sussex we are lucky to have the tradition of Bonfire that for hundreds of years has provided an opportunity for communities to come together and enjoy a thoroughly good time, often in the past involving riot and drunkenness. There’s almost an echo of those events in modern day accounts of rowdy Halloween nights, with packs of teenagers wandering the streets demanding treats from strangers, and wreaking a terrible revenge on those who refuse to comply.
I used to blame America for all those elements of Halloween that I most disliked. The rampant commercialism, the trick-or-treating, grinning pumpkins – all seemed to me to be recent introductions from the other side of the Atlantic. How wrong I was. In actual fact, many Halloween rituals that we consider a modern introduction have their roots way back in history.
Samhain, an older Celtic tradition
The Christian festival of All Hallows (Saints) Day, when the souls of the dead are prayed for and vigils kept at gravesides is thought to be based on a much earlier, Celtic, calendar event. Samhain marked the end of harvest time and the beginning of winter and the darker half of the year. So the themes of death and darkness were at the centre of community rituals from the earliest times, and have continued down through the centuries, in the many grotesque carvings of Death and his skeletal followers found in local churches, and in the French tradition of the “danse macabre”.
And as for trick-or-treat being a new, American, introduction – in medieval England groups of children and beggars would go door-to-door at All Hallows Eve asking for ‘soul cakes‘, in exchange for promising to pray for the souls of the dead. Ireland and Scotland had their own rituals similar to ‘souling’, which often involved groups disguising themselves as ghostly horses, (hence ‘guising‘) and reciting poetry in return for food.
Scottish and Irish immigrants inevitably brought their tradition of guising with them to the countries where they settled in the 19th century – and in a wonderfully circular way, that tradition has returned across the Atlantic in the form of trick-or-treating in modern times.
So it seems that our need for a sense of community, for bonding together to defy the darkness and death that awaits us all in the end, is as strong as it ever was. You might like to comfort yourself with that thought as you open the door to the next group of children with their pumpkin lanterns demanding, “Trick or treat, missis?”
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