Dooyoo Halloween Compo - The Season of The Witch (Halloween 2006)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Halloween 2006
Date:	07/10/06 (358 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A time to celebrate and do things with the family

Disadvantages: Out of control trick-or-treaters!

There’s a competition on Dooyoo for anything to do with Halloween she said and so…hmmm…..I thought, maybe there’s an opportunity to reminisce over this underrated time of year and perhaps even pontificate over some of its traditions. Halloween is always something that’s only ever really made me think of stalk and slash killers wearing ski masks and calling themselves Michael Myers. That said, with the vast torrent of costume wearing, wee scallywags that knock on my door these days, threatening me with trick-or-treat then maybe that John Carpenter classic movie has finally turned into reality! Nope, we never did celebrate Halloween in any major way when I was a kid; no pumpkin soup (ewwww), no Jack-o-lantern’s in the window, not even anyone going around wearing their mom’s white bed sheet. It was all a bit of a non-event really apart from the odd timely showing of Scooby Doo on the telly. Have you noticed how much bigger Halloween has become over the last few years in this country, though? There was a time when Halloween played a salutary second fiddle to Bonfire Night six days later and the most people did was to buy a plastic pumpkin lantern and shove it in the front window on the 31st October. Halloween or more technically correct, Hallowe'en, is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening before "All Hallows' Day" (also known as "All Saints' Day"). Halloween was also sometimes called All Saints' Eve. The holiday was a day of religious festivities in various northern European pagan traditions, until it was appropriated by Christian missionaries and given a Christian interpretation. Halloween is also called Pooky Night in some parts of Ireland, presumably named after the púca, a mischievous spirit.

Halloween has a long history and there’s a special affinity for the colour and danger that goes with the tradition. In Celtic times, it was said that the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year as it was believed to be their only hope of finding the afterlife. The Celts believed all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living. As you might expect, the living weren’t that keen on being possessed so on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes making them look cold and undesirable. At this point, they would dress up in ghoulish costumes and noisily parade around the village being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits. Some might say that this sounds just like a typical night in any town or city just after last orders these days and maybe that’s where our drink-fuelled, nocturnal rowdy nature originates from at times (a likely story, me lad). The extinguishing of fires does have a further explanation in that Celts extinguished their fires so that all the Celtic tribes could relight their fires from a common source, the Druidic fire that was kept burning in the Middle of Ireland, at Usinach. There are stories of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as sort of a lesson to the spirits.

Of course, there is a certain fascination with the origins of festivals like Halloween and the tradition of apple bobbing is said to originate from the Romans who, in the first century AD, assimilated Samhain (Halloween) into celebrations during October. One such celebration was the day to honour Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and, hence, the derivative tradition of apple bobbing came to be. D'yer know, I can honestly say that I've never bobbed for apples but I've seen many a victim with the St. John's ambulance services on standby as the plucky bobber takes a deep breath and plunges their head into a bowl of water full of apples. It all looks a bit too much like hard work to me.

Halloween is more associated with the U.S. than anywhere else and Irish immigrants fleeing their country’s potato famine brought the custom of Halloween to America in the 1840’s. The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes" which were made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven. Today’s trick-or-treating is big business with sweet shop owners and supermarkets like Tesco selling out of bags of chocolates and sweets like there’s no tomorrow around the end of October but then, if you are anything like me, you’ll prefer to give the little persishers standing at the door something rather than risk your car being scratched!

One of the trademark images of Halloween is the Jack-o-lantern glowing in a million windows on a cold, frosty October night. The custom of the grinning beacon probably comes from Irish folklore as the tale of a man named Jack, notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricking Satan into climbing a tree. The story goes that Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree's trunk, trapping the devil. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree. After Jack died, sadly he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer. Part of the lore that goes with Halloween is all those moms and dads spending quality time with their kids scooping out the insides of pumpkins to make their Jack-o-lanterns but next time you make one, remember to tell your son or daughter that it was The Irish that used turnips and not pumpkins as their "Jack's lanterns" originally. When the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips and so the Jack-O-Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember. Needless to say, the rest of the world followed suit eventually and Walmart spotted another chink in the market in making plastic Jack-O-Lanterns to flog to the masses who couldn't be bothered with making their own.

Like most holidays and traditions, Halloween was born from older religions celebrating their own rituals. In this case, the rituals of Celts celebrating a New Year, and out of medieval prayer rituals of Europeans. It’s a wonderfully colourful time that provides a bridge from Autumn to Winter as we head towards our own Bonfire Night celebrations and the macabre tradition of burning effigies of Guy Fawkes on large fires. Who said that we can’t adopt our own, less than kind traditions, but turn it into a time to rejoice a truly magical time of year?

Thanks for reading (and my thanks to Wendy Bull for mentioning this compo)

Mara

Summary: My Dooyoo Halloween Compo entry thingy