When I was a kid, we didn’t have Halloween. That is, the church probably had All Hallows’ E’en, which as we all know is the origin of the name – but we didn’t have all the stuff with pumpkins, witches, and trick or treating. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but there certainly wasn’t all the commercial hoo-ha, or any school activities, and certainly no running around the neighbourhood after dark, extorting sweeties from strangers with threats of property damage.

As far as it’s possible to know, this hasn’t caused any lasting psychological scars, although that perhaps is for others to judge.  But it is interesting to have a bit of an unstructured think about these things – call me cynical, but a bit of perspective is always good when hype and cultural globalisation threaten to turn what’s meaningful into undifferentiated Hallmark-scented sludge.

So it’s with some pride that I report that all this end-of-October carry-on seems to have originated with my father’s people, the Irish. Well, the Celts, who not only hung out in Ireland, but also in Scotland, Wales and parts of France. They had a thing called Samhain, which was their version of New Year, when the harvest was done and a cold, possibly fatal, winter loomed. They thought that it was easier to commune with the dead at this time, and would indulge in a spot of dressing up and partying. Little doubt that there was some alcoholic consumption too.

As with so many other traditional practices, Samhain didn’t disappear as Christianity took hold, but was subsumed into, and altered by, the religion. So to celebrate the saints – all of whom had their own days but were celebrated en masse once a year – they happened to choose 1 and 2 November for All Hallows and All Souls’ Days respectively. ‘Hallow’ is a Scots term for honouring someone or something, as in “hallowed be thy name.”  And the night before All Hallows Day? Why, that would be All Hallows E’en  . . . Halloween. We have my mother’s people, the Scots, to thank for that one.

With both pagans and Christians, Hallowe’en dinner involved all sorts of practices to placate the spirits of the dead in the hope of securing a less doom-laden winter. They’d set places at the table for them, stoke up special fires for them, and engage in various games for their amusement – and they’d try to divine the future, an important part of the proceedings. It was said that young women would be able to divine the identity of their one true love by bobbing for apples or pouring molten candle wax into water. What can I say? In those days, tinder had a whole different significance.

Rituals which developed in medieval times included ‘mumming’ or dressing up and larking about (apparently a kind of amateur dramatics), and ‘guising’, or dressing up as ghosts and ghouls and going from door to door asking for food in exchange for a song or poem. Not hard to see where trick-or-treating started, is it?

As for jack-o lanterns, the good Irish peasants of yore came up with this phenomenon, using turnips instead of pumpkins. Guisers would carry them to scare off evil. Pumpkins were introduced in the mid-19th century US of A – at whose feet we also lay the blame for all the rampant hype that came after.

Anyway, my first experience of trick-or-treating was in Clapton, East London, 1993. I was alone in an enormous shared house – perhaps my housemates were bobbing for apples somewhere but if so, they hadn’t told me. There was a knock on the door and two very small children in horror masks were revealed, crying “trick or treeeat!” We hadn’t laid in any supplies in anticipation of this, and being a bunch of struggling artists, impecunious students and an illegal alien, didn’t have much in the way of sweets or chocolate lying around.

“I know what this is,” I thought, drawing on incomplete impressions gleaned from Peanuts cartoons and TV sitcoms – “These children will be delighted with a donation of nice healthy fruit.” Urging them to wait a sec, I dashed inside and retrieved two apples – small, yellowed and rather wizened apples – one of which I tossed into each proffered bucket.
“Er – thanks,” said one, sounding underwhelmed.
“What did he give us?” piped the other.
“Onions!” said the first, voice dripping with disgust.
Given the neighbourhood, we were lucky not to get a Molotov cocktail through the front window as a riposte.

Maybe because in the southern hemisphere this all happens in spring, the whole Halloween thing has a slight air of “so what?” for me. Those with small children tell me it’s different when you see the joy and greed lighting up their tiny faces on this most special of nights. Seems it’s too late for this cynical, shrivelled soul – now excuse me while I drink my pumpkin chai latte.