The trouble with Halloween isn’t just, as Rachel Johnson points out today, that it’s the occasion for large scale larceny by the young and conspicuous ghoul-related consumption by adults on an indecent scale; it’s also a loathsome revenant of its former self. I grew up with Halloween in its old form in Ireland and I can tell you right now that no one thought of spending money on imitation spider webbing, let alone zombie exclusion placards and no one resorted to pumpkins of any description — this was the turnip era. But then that was the time before Halloween, having been taken to America by Irish migrants, returned to Ireland and Britain in a hideous and unrecognisable form.
We did indeed dress up in something scary on Halloween night – face masks, with your father’s coats and hats or a sheet — and go in groups from door to door asking for a penny for the bobbin’. What we got in return were apples, nuts (we were particularly fond of monkey-nuts, or raw peanuts) and coins. We’d divvy these out on our return and some would be put in a basin of water into which we’d dive to retrieve them and obviously the coins on the bottom would be hardest. Then there’d be the usual business of hanging an apple on a string to eat, one on each side. And there’s be Barmbrack, a yeasted fruit cake, sliced and eaten with butter.
Let me tell you about Barmbrack — you can get recipes for the yeast sort online. It would have a ring in the middle, wrapped in greaseproof paper and the one to get the ring would be the first to marry – these were the days, you understand, when this was thought of as a good thing. In earlier versions, there might also be a coin for wealth, a rag or matchstick (I think, for poverty) and a button for a bachelor and a thimble for a spinster – and too bad if you were misgendered. But it was a harmless sort of divination, a faint echo of the much older customs on the night when there was outright fortune telling.
Anyway, Barmbrack is both delicious and not particularly sweet. What you absolutely didn’t get was chocolate. It was not, like every other season for the year, an occasion for a chocolate fest in the form of ghosties or pumpkins or graveyard fingers. Our teeth, at the end of it were in good nick, given the amount of apples we ate. Neither did we say Trick or Treat, a weird US formula. And we absolutely didn’t say Happy Hallowe’en. It is the equivalent of saying Happy All Saint’s Day Eve, which is a bit peculiar, no?
Hallowe’en as practised here and still more in America is a fake feast
We also had something called Banging Night, the night before Hallowe’en, which as the name implies, was an occasion for bad behaviour generally, notably, banging on people’s doors and running away before they opened it. That too is of long standing.
Hallowe’en as practised here and still more in America is a fake feast. The real version is indeed to do with the dead and with spirits and ghosties. It is a combination of an actual Celtic thing, the feast of Samhain, which was the end of summer and the beginning of winter, and in antiquity, an occasion for a get-together involving feasting and storytelling, and a genuine Christian feast, the Eve of All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) and, a day later, of All Souls’ Day, when we say prayers for the dead. The customs of the day – offering cake for the souls (that was a custom in England and Wales too), a bit of divination, dressing up as ghosts or generally scary things – are of very long provenance. But it was not commercialised, beyond supermarkets doing Barmbrack and a roaring trade in monkey nuts and others for the day.
Hallowe’en has been grafted onto an actual English festivity, viz, Guy Fawkes’s night and the bonfires and fireworks and guys that were associated with it. We did not, being Catholic, have anything to do with Guy Fawkes, poor man, but it was a genuine Protestant commemoration with a genuine sectarian element to it in places like Lewes. But it has been subsumed in the contemporary Hallowe’en orgy, to the diminution, I think, of the cycle of the year.
So, if you really want to do Hallowe’en, keep it simple. Nuts, apples, money; no chocolate. Face masks fine, entire body suits, nope. Dress up in old clothes. Find a recipe for barmbrack and put a ring in it. Bob for apples. And do not, whatever you do, wish anyone a Happy Hallowe’en.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
