Ah, November 31st. The day
where an influx of the hushed whispers of little girls, rocking chairs and
china dolls are on the big screen, Haribo sweets now have horror mix alongside cheap
witch hats and matching brooms on the first aisle at supermarkets, and there
are popular articles online for the best Halloween outfits – or, alternatively,
the most offensive Halloween outfits. As a child living in London, trick or
treating was a strange concept that involved reiterated warnings of not
knocking on stranger’s doors and razors-in-apples horror stories. The sweets
were always a good comfort eat on the day and extended to a few days afterwards.
At university, Halloween involves horror club nights, slutty nurse outfits alongside
the ever-popular Spartan, Greek and Roman ones as it only needs a cheap and
easy white bed sheet, alcohol and someone miserably spewing in the street
surrounded by laughing friends and bored-looking policemen. It also means it’s
the perfect time to scoff sweets and re-watch Shaun of the Dead.
Sometimes criticized as one of the
many American traditions that have travelled around the pond to Britain, while
modern Halloween is now concerned with costumes and sugar, it once evolved from
the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain. Known as All Hallows Eve, it was north
European festival that signalled the end of the light and warm half of the
year, ushering in a cold and dark one. The Celts used the day to mark the end
of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, and also believed that this
transition between the seasons was a bridge to the world of the dead. It was a
pagan ritual and one of the greatest religious festivals of this ancient
northern pagan year.
In the ushering in of winter, it was
at the time considered a frightening and inconvenient season in the northlands
prefacing months of darkness, cold and hunger. Perhaps think ‘winter is coming’
in this sense; it was a foreboding moment and so Halloween was regarded as the
time when the spirits of darkness and fear would come, and when malevolent
forces of nature would be let lose. The warriors, traders, sailors and other
skilful people would return and there would be stories, celebrations, the
settlement of disputes, and the taking of stock in this season. In medieval
Ireland local kings were said to hold a feast at their royal halls, for a week
before and after Samhain, for all these purposes. Festivals would occur and
people would sing songs about spirits or dress up as them to mock the arriving
season. It was commonly asserted that the feast was the pagan festival of the
dead - in reality, it was to commemorate the dead.
During the Protestant reformation, it
removed these rites from most of Britain, and left only a vague sense of
Halloween as a time with certain associations, however, it survived in its
actual form in Ireland as the Catholic feast of saints and souls. The idea of
Halloween being translated from America comes from the celebration of Halloween
as a great seasonal festival that travelled here through massive Irish
emigration to America in the 19th century took it over there.
Halloween developed into a national
festivity for Americans, retaining the custom of dressing up to mock powers of
dark, cold and death, and a transforming one by which poor people went door to
door to beg for food for a feast of their own. By the 1980s, the celebration
came to Britain. Currently, traditional activities include trick-or-treating,
bonfires, costume parties, haunted houses, and jack-o-lanterns. So everyone, consume
all the sugar you want, don’t worry too much about outfits unless that is your
thing – fake blood and a bed sheet always does the trick for those on a budget –
and have some fun!
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