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mask131 · 2 years

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Deadly fall: Halloween

HALLOWEEN

Category: World culture / International holiday

What is Halloween? It is Hallowe’en. What is Hallowe’en? It is Allhalloween. What is Allhalloween? It is All Hallows’Eve – aka All Saints’ Eve. Hence its celebration on the night of the 31st of October, before All Saints Day on the 1st of November.

Halloween appeared in the British Isles and was the result of a fusion: Christianity, to smother the “pagan” celebration of Samhain, imposed on it its Allhallowtide celebrations (see my posts about Samhain and All Saints Day). But the traditions of Samhain survived into the Christianized Isles, and soon they fused themselves with the All Saints and All Souls Day traditions, and this led to the birth of a new holiday: Halloween. [Note that Samhain actually wasn’t everywhere in the British Isles – it was celebrated in Ireland and Scotland mostly. The other parts of the Isles had their own analogous celebrations, which I will make a post about one of those days – but given Samhain was the most famous and influential, and that Halloween was most fervently celebrated by the Irish and the Scottish, precisely due to Samhain – we’ll simplify Halloween as “Samhain’s child”].

For a very long time Halloween was seen as the local oddity of Great-Britain, not present in any other European countries. When the United-States were born, the holiday didn’t even hold on there: the Puritans had a too strong dislike of holidays of all kinds (they didn’t even trust Christmas!). We would have to wait for the massive immigration of Irish and Scottish people in the 19th century for Halloween to actually take a hold on America: the celebration brought from oversea fascinated the Americans so much that, by the early 20th century, it became a recurring and popular holiday among them – and the rise in fame of Halloween even pushed it, by the end of the 20th century, into one of the most important and iconic holidays of the United-States. It is to the point that many people of Europe call it an “American invention”, despite the holidays’ roots being in Europe itself… But it is true that it was the American version of the holiday that made its way back into Western Europe at the end of the 20th century and in the 21st, thanks to the USA’s cultural influence: it was the Americanized Halloween that then reached Australia, New-Zealand, Japan, and even some Southern American countries… Oh and I forgot poor Canada – everybody forgets poor Canada, who actually grew and developed the Halloween tradition alongside the United-States (in fact the tradition of trick-or-treating seems to have been born in Canada before reaching the USA!).

Let’s put history aside for a while, though. For this post, I would like to focus on the various rules and traditions of Halloween – let’s talk about the Halloween customs!

# Trick-or-treating. This is the main and most famous feature of Halloween: children disguise themselves and go knocking from house to house at night fall, saying “Trick or treat!” – and adults inside give them candy. The tradition of giving candies relies in the very sentence used: “treat” is here a stand-in for sweets, candies (or in older times money). If the house refused to give “treats”, then they had the “tricks”: some form of unharmful mischief, pranks and various annoyances. This tradition is an inheritance of Samhain’s tradition of “guising” (see my post about Samhain), back when youth or poor people went door-to-door, often disguised, putting up small performances in exchange for food or money, and warning people that misfortune would befall them if they were not kindly welcomed. These people were supposedly disguised as inhabitants of the Otherworld (fairies, ghosts, monsters and the like) ; and this tradition mixed itself with the “souling” tradition of All Souls’ Day, on which beggars and homeless went door-to-door, acting as or in behalf of the dead in purgatory, begging for food or money (often given as soul cakes).

As the tradition went over to America, it was children only who started “guising”, and reinterpreting this old tradition as the “trick-or-treat”. It first spread in Canada and northern/western America back in the 1920s-1930s, before spreading to the south and the east – by 1950s all of the United-States knew of the “trick-or-treating”. While met with some suspicion at first (the youth gathering been seen as “gangs” and their trick-or-treating as a sort of blackmail), it soon became considered a form of “harmless fun”. Back in early 20th century, the “tricks” took the shape of stealing wheels, wagons, barrels and sometimes even gates, back in the United-State countryside, by 1950s this “rural vandalism” was gone, replacing by other forms of more “urban” vandalism, such as throwing eggs at a house or covering a building in rolls of toilet papers.

# The trick-or-treating traditions ties in with the tradition of masks: at Halloween, people have to disguise themselves. This is well-known. Originally, the costumes seem to have been open for all (though it was mostly youths who did it – for the “guising”), and this whole “disguised” nature made the original Halloween quite carnival-like: in the 19th century, costumed parades and masked revelries were noted with a big disapprobation, as they often lead to debauchery and public disorder. To control this “wilderness”, in the early 20th century Halloween was reinvented and imposed as an indoor celebration, a private party among families and friends, while the costuming was focused entirely on the children (too silly for grownups): it corresponds to the rise and expansion of the trick-or-treating tradition between 1930s and 1950s. However, by the end of the 20th century, it was not uncommon to see adults disguised too, in fact adults and children being both disguised had become quite a norm. In fact, we can say that by the 21st century the whole “Halloween-carnival” thing completely made a backflip, as now there are many scandals and debates over “sexy Halloween costumes” designed to be worn by women and be sexually suggestive, coupled with denunciations of youth using Halloween as an excuse to indulge into alcohol-binging and sex-filled revelries.

Halloween costumes have a long history. The original costumes of the Hallowe’en-Samhain of old Scotland and Ireland, back in early 19th century, were quite rustic and simple: grotesque masks, blackened or painted faces, hoods, cross-dressing… The very basis of the Halloween costume was to disguise as supernatural and creepy characters, in imitation of the old Celtic inhabitants of the Otherworld: early Halloween in America was inspired by Gothic art, and so had macabre costumes of witches, werewolves, devils, vampires, skeletons, ghosts and other undead. However, as I said there was an attempt at adding “cuteness” into early Halloween, back when the wilderness was “tamed” and the holiday marked for children – this led to the apparition of costumes of fairies, angels, princesses, animals… As time went by, the original “creepiness” of the costumes was forgotten and exchanged for variations and imaginations: super-heroes, robots and aliens, rising in popularity in the USA, joined the ranks of the mask ; presidents, political figures and historical ones also appeared ; and then there was a whole host of disguises just based on archetypes popular with children: cowboys, ninjas, cosmonauts – and even a lot of disguises that would not age well (remember the whole Cowboy-and-Indian phase?). Another important change to Halloween costumes should be noted: originally, up to the early 20th century, Halloween costumes were hand-made by the parents or the family of the children going out ; they were crafted with whatever materials you had, each unique. It all started to change when in the 1930s, companies started to realize Halloween costumes could be a good business and started mass-producing them: Fishbach and Ben Cooper were two of the most famous “costume-makers” back then. Nowadays, the majority of Halloween costumes were bought in stores.

# Halloween started out as a holiday of morbidity and macabre, influenced by both the Christian traditions tied to Allhallowtide (worship and praying of the dead, visits of cemeteries) and the Gothic literature very prominent at the time – skulls, skeletons and bones became symbols of the holiday, and prominent monstrous characters of Gothic or early horror literature (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, ghosts, mummies) became associated with the festive night. All sorts of evil and spooky things were also added, ranging from folkloric monsters to the devil imagery of Christianity, people took the habit of telling each other creepy ghost stories on this night, and slowly from a simple “macabre”, Halloween became a holiday of spooks and scare, a night of fear dedicated to terror: the rise of the horror genre not only led to icons of horror movies becoming “usual faces” of Halloween, but many people also took the habit of doing “horror movies marathon” during Halloween, or watching scary movies either at home or in theaters. All sorts of attractions and festivals started to be built each Halloween, entirely based on scaring people: fake haunted houses, creepy corn mazes, spooky hayrides (the latter two a testimony to the “rural roots” of Halloween)… Amusement parks organized big Halloween days, television shows started to have “Halloween special” episodes, and the pranking didn’t even stay inside the “trick-or-treating” tradition, as it became common to prank people on the night just to “scare” them…

# Halloween has many more symbols. There’s the skulls and skeletons, as I said before.

There’s the black cat too – seen as a familiar of witches, as a form taken by the devil, as a bringer of bad luck, the animal soon became a common one to be depicted on Halloween illustrations, alongside bats (with a just as bad reputation as an ugly and wicked creature, a reputation fueled by the Gothic ideas of vampire bats or bats haunting abandoned castles). Scarecrows also tend to be prominent to Halloween – literally designed to scare, and taken from the rural areas in which Halloween was first born. But the most iconic symbol of Halloween, what everybody knows about, is the pumpkin, THE autumn vegetable of the USA (as Halloween stays an autumn-based holiday), that the tradition asks to be carved into a grotesque smiling face, usually with a candle placed-inside it. It is the Jack-o-lantern, a pumpkin-ornament taken from old Irish tradition, and that became an unremovable trait of the holiday: carving pumpkins for Halloween became an art, leading to competitions, and it is said that, to signalize if your house is open to trick-or-treating, you must leave a jack-o-lantern outside your door. Halloween also is tied up to a trio of colors: orange (the autumnal color, the color of dead leaves and pumpkins), black (the color of darkness and death, of the upcoming “dark season”, of witches and shadows), and purple (a color of mystic and magic, sometimes associated with witches).

# Beyond pumpkin in all of its forms (pumpkin pie and roasted pumpkin seeds being the most notable), there are many other foods at Halloween. Candy cannot be escaped, of course: it is what children ask and receive through trick-or-treating, and it is what they later gorge on during the night. Halloween is the night of candies, chocolates and caramels. Apples are THE fruit of Halloween – not only due to it being an autumnal fruit, but also due to Samhain’s connection to apples (see my post about it). Apples themselves are eaten, but also candy apples, toffee apples and caramel apples. Another traditional Halloween dish is well-known in Ireland: the barmbrack, or “brack”, a yeast bread with sultanas and raisins. In an old tradition dating back to “modern Samhain/early Halloween”, when the cake is baked several items are placed inside it, for a fortune-telling game: depending on which object you obtain in your slice of the cake, you will know a special kind of future. A coin means fortunes and riches, a ring means you’ll marry within the year, a piece of cloth means you’ll be poor or suffer bad luck, a stick means a unhappy marriage or disputes with your spouse, a pea signifies that you will not marry that year, a bean that you would have a future without money – sometimes there can also be a medallion, usually with the picture of the Virgin Mary on it, to signify that you’ll have a religious vocation.

# Halloween has always been a night of “games”. Today people entertain themselves by visiting creepy attractions and haunted houses, by telling spooky stories or watching horror movies, or doing the barmbrack divination (see above) – but before, Halloween was THE big night of divination games and rituals to see into the future. The barmbrack divination rite I said above was always a Halloween divination game in Scotland and Ireland, though sometimes the food might change: cranachan (a raspberry dessert), champ (mashed potatoes with butter, milk and scallions) or even colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage or kale). Most of the divination games I described in my Samhain post were also part of the traditions of “early Halloween”: the apple peel rite, the roasting of hazelnuts… Another rite of “modern Samhain” was the preparation of a salty oatmeal bannock: the person doing the rite had to eat it entirely in three bites, before going to sleep straight away without speaking to anyone or drinking anything. They would dream of their future spouse, appearing to offer them a drink to quench their first. Another game, purely of Halloween this time, becoming popular in the late 19th century and spreading to the early 20th, had unmarried women look into a mirror in a dark room, to see the face of their future husband appear – this Halloween rite would later fuel the urban legend of “Bloody Mary”. A variation of the barmbrack rite was the Irish “pulcini”, the “game of the blindfolds” : a person has a blindfold on and must choose between several saucers, with the item inside predicting their future. A ring for marrying soon, a piece of clay to mean you will soon die, water for an emigration, rosary beads for becoming a monk, nun or priest, a coin to be rich, a bean to be poor, etc…

Halloween also has numerous other games that have no actual divination purpose or magical powers, and that are just fun and silly games people did to entertain themselves. Apple bobbing is the most famous of these games: apples are placed in a basin of water, and the participants must remove them using only their teeth and nothing else. A variation of the apple-bobbing game is made by hanging a small wooden rod to the ceiling: on one hand, a candle, on the other an apple on a string. The candle makes the rod spin around, and people had to catch the apple in the air with their teeth. Another similar game involved tying scones to the ceiling, but not without covering them up first with treacle or syrup: people had to snatch them away with their bare teeth, which would lead to a very sticky and dirty face.

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I purposefully avoided talking much about the jack-o-lanterns, because I keep them for another post. If you ever want to do research or find information about Halloween traditions or earlier celebrations of Halloween, I can suggest you to look into the tradition of Halloween cards. Just like those of Christmas, Halloween cards (postcards, greeting cards) have been around since the 1890s and are extremely rich in Halloween imagery and information. Today they are still sought and collected as precious memorabilia.

About trick-or-treating, as time went by, the activity became much more surveilled and strict. It wasn’t uncommon a few decades ago to let children wander on their own to do the trick-or-treating, with no adult supervision – however since a rise of child-related incidents, children are now commonly accompanied by an adult or a chaperon in their trick-or-treating ; or the going door-to-door takes place before sunset instead of after nightfall. This is notably tied to a form of mass hysteria that hit the USA and formed a new urban legend: the “deadly candy” of Halloween. Rumors went around and then were spread by media about people giving out poisoned candies or apples with razor-blades to children on Halloween night, and soon all parents were searching their kids’ Halloween stash for hidden needles or broken glass. It should be noted that this whole rumor was NOT based on any real-life events, or rather that there was no proven case of “poisoned candy” before the urban legend was created – if the death of a child on Halloween was invoked, a bit of investigation would always reveal that it was not tied to their Halloween candy or meetings with a stranger: most of these kids dying while trick-or-treating or eating Halloween candies died of natural causes, chronical sicknesses or infections. However, the legend became so widespread that it suffered from the “copycat effect”. People, inspired by the hysteria, started to place dangerous objects inside candies – sometimes it was even children who placed them in their own stash to become part of the “legend”. We also know some unfortunate cases of accidental deaths or murders that the responsible party tried to cover-up by invoking the “dangerous Halloween candy” legend: one kid died when he discovered and ate his uncle’s heroin stash on Halloween night, and the urban legend was invoked ; while another boy was poisoned by his very own father on Halloween with cyanide-covered candies. The only two “real” incidents on which the legend could have been based were isolated incidents: in the late 50s in California a dentist gave laxative pills disguised as candies to trick-or-treaters, while in mid-60s New York, a woman decided to give to kids she deemed too old to be trick-or-treating bags of clearly inedible items, ranging from steel wool to dog biscuits.

#deadly fall #halloween #all hallows eve #holiday #allhalloween #traditions #divination

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