Halloween Traditions

From Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-leggedly Beasties and Things that go Bump in the Night. –Cornish and/or Scottish prayer.

I’ve always liked that phrase. It says so much about the things in the shadows that we can’t see, and how that plays with our imaginations. And nothing quite plays with our imaginations as much as Halloween. Humans have a long history with what to do with the dead, how to imagine death, and what the dead get up to once they are dead. Besides terrifying weather, earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions, nothing gets us going—religiously speaking—like the dead.

In our western European traditions, we’ve tried to deal with it in a mish-mash of Christian belief with old earth religion beliefs. And it is at this intersection where we find our earliest traditions about Halloween.

But it wasn’t all pumpkins and Jack-O-Lanterns. In fact, pumpkins are New World fruit. So back in the Old World, Scotland to be exact, they carved out turnips. And believe me, those were far scarier than a smiling pumpkin (and really hard to carve. You’ll need a Dremel.) See below! Argh!

As for witches, we tend to think of two types. The sweet or sexy siren from any latest streaming show, or the green-skinned, long-nosed cackling variety, cornering the wayward child in the woods or trying to go after a young girl with a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion.

The long history of witches comes from all different corners of the globe, in varying cultures. Some of the witches were always seen as evil, but some were more benign, even helpful. “Double, Double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble” comes to us from the Weird Sisters from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who do very witchy things and do a little prophesying too. For several centuries thereafter, this is what we think of when we say “witch.”

One of the other symbols of this time is the Devil, or any old demon will do. After all, all sorts of hobgoblins were afoot after dark, doing their mischief, souring the milk, tangling our hair while we sleep.

And then, of course, because we are talking about All Hallows Eve, or Hallowed (Holy) Evening and referring to the dead, whose spirit finds it a pleasant time to go wandering, there is the image of the ghost and the skeleton.

Costumes
People have liked dressing up as these various creatures of imagination for a long time, either partly in fear of them, or to appease them. Halloween has its roots in the ancient, pre-Christian Gaelic festival of Samhain (pronounced SAH–wn), which was celebrated on the night of October 31. The Gaelic people, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, believed that the dead returned to earth on Samhain. People would gather to light bonfires, offer sacrifices, and pay homage to the dead.

During some Gaelic celebrations of Samhain, villagers disguised themselves in costumes made of animal skins to scare away unwanted ghostly visitors. In later centuries, people began dressing up as ghosts, and devils, and in exchange for food and drink, they’d romp about, entertaining the crowds. This custom was called “mumming”, and dates back to the Middle Ages, a precursor of trick-or-treating.

In later centuries, in Scotland and Ireland, young people took part in a tradition called “guising”, dressing up in costume and going from house to house, to receive a bribe of fruit, nuts, or even coins to perform some kind of “trick”—singing, reciting a poem, or something else—replacing the earlier custom of mumming.

Trick-or-Treating 
Some American colonists celebrated Guy Fawkes Day–which commemorates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, a Catholic-led conspiracy to blow up England’s parliament building and remove Protestant King James I from power. In the mid-19th century, large numbers of new immigrants, especially those fleeing the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s, helped popularize Halloween.

In the early 20th century, Irish and Scottish communities revived the Old World traditions of “souling” (people would pass out pastries called “soul cakes” in exchange for praying for the dead) and guising in the United States. By the 1920s, however, it had gotten out of hand. Pranks had become outright vandalism, acts of violence, and arson causing real damage amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you remember the Halloween scenes in the Judy Garland movie, Meet Me In St. Louis and the bonfires and pranks the kids got up to, it could get pretty terrifying.

“Tricks or treats”, as it was called, began around 1911, and evolved into this more benign form of Halloweening rather than bonfires and vandalism, and it began in Canada, not the U.S., though it quickly spread to their southern neighbors. Most of it was community-based organizing of a trick-or-treating tradition of passing out candy to costumed kids coming to their door. The idea that an American president in the 30s initiated for this change in Halloween is not true. Des Moines, Iowa is the only area known to have an actual record of trick-or-treating being used specifically to deter crime.

The earliest known reference to “trick or treat”, was printed in the November 4, 1927 edition of The Blackie, Alberta Canada Herald:
“Hallowe’en provided an opportunity for real strenuous fun. No real damage was done except to the temper of some who had to hunt for wagon wheels, gates, wagons, barrels, etc., much of which decorated the front street. The youthful tormentors were at back door and front demanding edible plunder by the word “trick or treat” to which the inmates gladly responded and sent the robbers away rejoicing.”

As the years went on, Halloween had become big business, first in candy sales, then in home décor. I don’t think I have to tell you that it is second only to Christmas for consumer spending.

We’ve come a long way from our fear of those “beasties” in the dark. And maybe it’s a good thing. Or is it? I think we’ll always be a little afraid of things in the dark, things we can’t quite see, can’t quite understand. That’s what Halloween has been about all along.