As a Brit growing up in the 1980s, Halloween was something of a rite of passage.
In October 1988, the buzz in our school canteen wasn’t over who fancied the new girl or who pissed in the swimming pool. It was about who was going as Freddy Krueger. We traded algebra for art as we painstakingly designed costumes in the back of our exercise books.
To light his way, the devil tossed Jack a burning ember from hell, which Jack put inside a hollowed-out turnip.
Of course, back then, we lived in a high-trust society: Parents let us roam the night streets unaccompanied, knocking on strangers’ doors until our pillowcases bulged with sweets we had to drag home and divide.
Fast-forward nearly 40 years, and Halloween in the U.K. feels as dead as a George Romero zombie.
Pooka power
Every year it’s the same. The commentariat inveighs against American cultural imperialism, and the British public prepares for what feels like a hostage situation. Entire streets plunge into darkness as homeowners tape up their letterboxes, turn off the lights, and pretend to be out.
I don’t blame them. If a teenager in a tracksuit and Ghostface mask knocks on a door on a typical English housing estate, he’s unlikely to be a fan of Wes Craven’s postmodern horror franchise. The knife he's carrying will probably be real, and he won’t be after a Snickers bar.
In contrast, America seems to love Halloween. Entire neighborhoods build haunted houses, while parents dress up alongside their children and have street parades. It’s all very communitarian and, more importantly, fun!
The joke, of course, is on us. That wholesome, happy American family yelling "trick or treat" isn’t celebrating a homegrown invention. America didn’t invent Halloween. Like cricket, we gave it to you. But unlike cricket, you glammed it up, put it in a blood-soaked plastic body bag, and sold it back to us.
As with all eccentric British traditions, you have to go back over 2,000 years to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated in Ireland and elsewhere in the Celtic world around the end of October. Marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter, it was associated with the turning of the year and the supernatural.
In later Irish folklore, this was a night when the boundary between the living and the spirit world grew thin, allowing creatures like the Pooka to roam the earth. Disguises, bonfires, and attempts to ward off troublesome spirits became part of the traditions associated with the season.
A proper carve-up
In the eighth century, the Catholic Church added another layer to the festivities. Pope Gregory III established a November 1 observance honoring the saints in Rome, a date later adopted more widely for All Saints’ Day. Whether the timing was intended to supplant Samhain remains disputed, but Christian and older folk customs eventually became intertwined. The night before All Saints’ Day became known as All Hallows’ Eve — what we now call Halloween.
British and Irish traditions helped lay the foundation for what we do today: souling and guising. In England, long before kids demanded an industrial-size bag of M&Ms or your car keys under threat of violence, children and the needy went door-to-door singing and offering prayers for souls in exchange for “soul cakes,” sweet spiced cakes. Across Scotland and Ireland, the locals were guising, a custom involving dressing in grotesque disguises and performing songs for fruit and money.
The tradition of carving jack-o’-lanterns has strong roots in Ireland, including the legend of Stingy Jack. According to Irish folklore, Stingy Jack was a notorious trickster who pranked the devil. After his death, God refused him entry to heaven for being too sinful, but the devil — aware of his shenanigans — didn’t want him either, casting him out to wander the night for eternity. To light his way, the devil tossed Jack a burning ember from hell, which Jack put inside a hollowed-out turnip. The Irish carved disturbing faces into root vegetables to frighten away wandering spirits.
During the 1840s, when famine devastated Ireland, a massive influx of Irish immigrants arrived in North America, joining Scottish immigrants who brought related customs of their own. They packed up their meager possessions and brought their traditions with them.
One thing they were happy to leave behind was the turnip. In America, pumpkins were plentiful, larger, and easier to carve. It sowed the seeds, literally, of a cultural revolution — even if some in the Protestant majority regarded the newcomers’ customs as backward, popish superstitions.
Guy tried
As America took its first steps toward cementing this new tradition, Brits were, as usual, busy dismantling their own. Halloween as we know it now didn’t really exist in 19th- and much of 20th-century England. The closest we got was “Penny for the Guy,” a tradition associated with Bonfire Night on November 5. That was when Britain celebrated sticking it to the Catholics, commemorating Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605.
By the 19th century, children were pushing straw-filled dummies around the streets of Britain in wheelbarrows, asking for pennies to buy fireworks. The life-sized effigy would then sit atop a bonfire and be subsequently burned.
By the 1980s, this once-popular custom was disappearing from the streets where I grew up. “Penny for the Guy” was either carried on by a small handful of die-hard traditionalists or turned into a rich person’s hobby, children bedecked in bespoke Victorian clothes pushing a cart the price of small sedan.
The practice was dying through a combination of classic British tropes: apathy and regulation. Fireworks were being legislated out of our tiny hands. As someone who sat at the crossroads of a new cultural era, I had no interest in building a guy. Spending an entire weekend stuffing clothes with straw and shredded newspaper was too much to ask a generation discovering video games and MTV.
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Blast from the past
Sourcing illegal explosives, however? We’d work overtime for that. Our autumn side hustle involved pyromania. Like all boys through recorded history, we thought explosions were awesome. Shopkeepers were legally banned from selling to under-16s and kept fireworks under the counter away from youthful eyes, but it was no deterrent.
This was the 1980s. Laws were merely suggestions, never enforced. All it took was an older mate or a “cool” adult — one who would probably buy you beer as well — and voila! A world of blowing stuff up awaited. Parents were also more liberal (in a good way) and often took a libertarian view of our minor pyrotechnic carnage. One year, we put a friend in a dustbin, threw in half a dozen lit bangers, and sat on the lid. When he climbed out, all we did was roll around laughing. He looked like Wile E. Coyote after being given a cigar marked TNT. Glory days.
Enter America with a rebrand. Recognizing a Jason Voorhees gaping knife-wound-sized void in the British calendar, Hollywood and the American retail machine swooped in. America deconsecrated Halloween. They took its ancient folk customs, stripped them of their myth, and repackaged them in lowbrow, high-fructose glitzy consumerism.
I don’t blame them. They saw a bunch of kids who wanted some fun without the tedium of manual labor. But we didn’t adopt trick-or-treating simply because we loved watching serial killers slash cheerleaders in dormitories. It was because we were too lazy to build a life-sized doll.
The irony? We now fork out £20 for a tacky "Scream" mask and a bag of imported Hershey’s, forgetting that the whole freak show was ours in the first place.
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[H/T Blaze Media]
