Once Upon A Halloween
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Back in my day, and I’m taking way back when before halloween was a big thing in the UK like it is in the US. Way before people really dressed up or went trick or treating like they do now. I remember our family living in Scotland (who had a different set of traditions) carving out not pumpkins (they were somewhere in our far distant future) but turnips.
Yes, those pale and purple vegetables your mother forced you to eat as a kid. Halloween back in my day meant something entirely different, it being a celebration of the dead. And sharing the streets with the spirits that came out to commune with the living on the Eve of All Hallows Day (November 1st). So the turnip was carved out to hold a small candle, and used as a lantern, a Jack O' Lantern, to guide the spirits.
Some kids would dress up as witches, goblins, ghosts, and mummies, but not many had the money and you certainly couldn’t buy costumes like you can now, in the shops. There were no gratuitous decorations adorning houses, or pumpkins on porches (there were none). And the purpose of the kids Trick or Treating was all about pretending to be one or other of the spirits that were unbound coming to do mischief, like steel your dustbin lid, or rattle your doors and gates. And yes, occasionally, some of the older kinds would nick a gate, dustbin, or anything not nailed down as their Trick.
The idea was the home owner paid the kid in the form of toffee, or if we were lucky, a toffee apple, in order not to do the Trick part being bribed as it were with a Treat. Hence the term Trick or Treat, something that seems to have been lost over the years. Now it’s all about the Treats and the costumes? Anything goes.
It’s all a little sad to see what was once a treasured night in my childhood turned into yet another commercial money fest that lasts the whole month, and no long a celebrated night for the dead.
In my heart, every halloween, I am that little kid again with my turnip lantern walking the streets talking to the ghosts of my ancestors, letting them know, they’re not forgotten.