I’D LIKE to open with a time-honoured and universally recognised seasonal greeting.
Begorrah! Top of the midnight to ya! If I was you I wouldn’t start from here, sorr.
Yes, Halloween is an Irish festival, nurtured down the centuries in the Emerald Isle to spread around the world alongside other great green occasions such as St Patrick’s Day and Bloomsday.
It seems that while the English were drawing cartoons of Irish peasants chewing straws and carrying piglets, Irish rural traditions were capturing imaginations everywhere. This is what Tourism Ireland has to say: ‘Visit the island of Ireland at Halloween and you’ll be joining a celebration that started over 2,000 years ago.
‘Here, in the birthplace of Halloween, ancient Celts once marked the coming of winter with fires, feasting and festivities. Today, we carry on those traditions, blending heritage with hedonism to create a festival season you won’t want to miss.’
It may appear less than tactful to advertise the celebrated Irish love of witchcraft and witchery in England at a time when the election of Ireland’s new president Catherine Connolly has been coolly received on this side of the Irish Sea. But Tourism Ireland knows its business and there will be plenty of saps who buy in.
The Irish Halloween – O’Halloween? The Provisional Halloween? – is as good as anybody else’s. Halloween has to be the most rootless, pointless, least spiritual and most commercialised annual festival yet invented, unless you count Black Friday.
Fear of witches and black magic was everywhere before modern times, including in America, where smart businessmen in the 1930s saw a chance to shift some product. There was, for example, Ben Cooper, a New York costume designer who knocked up cheap Halloween witch outfits during the Depression when people couldn’t afford to go out often.
He diversified into television characters in the 1950s, and added glitter to the costumes to lessen the danger of children being run over when out at night. Perhaps they were being mown down by vengeful victims of the nasty American custom of trick-or-treating.
All those pumpkins you see on sale everywhere in October were originally American. The Great Pumpkin, awaited every year by Linus in the Peanuts cartoons of the mid-1960s, was the nearest to any religious or spiritual meaning that Halloween ever had.
At the time English children had something more interesting to do at the end of October, such as making guys, towing them around the streets begging pennies, building bonfires and buying fireworks. Any house with a garden and children had a bonfire party, and neighbours banded together to pool fireworks and food.
The parties celebrated the survival of the Protestant nation through the 16th and 17th centuries and the defeat of gunpowder, treason and plot, and so couldn’t be tolerated in the modern age. Cancellation began before it was fashionable to condemn colonialism and racism, so the reason given during the 1970s was the terrible danger of fire.
It always seemed to me the risks of firework night were outrageously exaggerated. No doubt there were fires and injuries, and less doubt that vandals loved to throw bangers around. But was there ever enough harm to justify the outlawing of the bangers and jumping jacks that children loved, or to insist that all bonfires had to be tame and organised large-scale public affairs with strict health and safety rules?
Hard to imagine any more boring way to spend an evening, and so the old Bonfire Night died. But don’t make the mistake of thinking the greatly lessened number of fires these days is a result of banning fireworks. People who work in fire prevention point to everyday changes: no one has chip pans to catch fire any more, and far fewer people smoke, so burning cigarettes don’t fall down the sofa.
I miss Bonfire Night. I wouldn’t miss Halloween, as any parties of children coming to my house this Friday in the vain expectation of getting sweets will discover. The Irish are welcome to it.
