Our English friends are wondering about the popularity of the American invention known as (do I have the name right?) Halloween. A recent harmless column in the Guardian headlined “Why is Halloween suddenly so big in Britain?” triggered a volley of clarifications from readers on that island’s Celtic fringe.
Twelve months ago the Daily Telegraph wondered how Halloween “toppled Christmas as Britain’s favourite holiday”. An opening anecdote had a pumpkin farmer talk us through a failed attempt to flog that seasonal squash some 30 years ago. “Everyone said: ‘Hallowe’en? That’s American – nobody will be interested’. And they were right. We sold six,” Stuart Beare told the journalist.
Obviously, any opportunity to yell corrections into English earholes is to be greatly savoured. Halloween is not American! You all know this. We were hacking eyeholes into the flinty flesh of Irish turnips – so much less yielding than the effete pumpkin – while the ancestors of today’s overdressed American trick-or-treaters were ... well, hacking eyeholes into the flinty flesh of Irish turnips, I guess. Or doing whatever the Italians, the Polish, the Chinese and the Koreans did at Halloween before they emigrated to the United States.
Scottish and Irish correspondents to the Guardian talked about trundling the black-and-white streets hoping to cadge a spare coin or a loose nut from merry neighbours. Dookin’ for apples. Halloween cake. Pennies in the barnbrack. The sort of stuff you encounter in nostalgic spoken-word pieces by Van Morrison.
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So, yes, we invented bloody Halloween. But the complaints in the Telegraph and the Guardian do have some application to Ireland. This will not be the first time this column has noted one of the most irritating confidence tricks in recent(ish) popular culture. The Americans absorbed our version of Halloween, transformed it into a vulgar commercial enterprise and then flogged it back to us with a greedy grin.
Nobody is quite sure when this happened. “Trick or treating”, as opposed to its variously named Irish ancestors, looks to have crept in as early as the 1980s, but I can remember travelling to the United States in the millennial years and, as October waned, still being astonished at the orange-and-black livery covering every exterior surface. Soon after that pumpkins became ubiquitous in Ireland. Then we began decorating our houses. By the time the century was properly under way, Halloween itself had become merely the end point for a month-long orgy of horror-related consumer bingeing.
There are plenty of reasons to get annoyed at this. It is always worth complaining about the insistence on allowing compliant hordes to have awful “fun”. You know the sort of thing. Tolerating the suggestion that fish fingers in the shape of coffins are “terrifying”. Not prosecuting retailers who describe themed products as being “spooktacular”. Failing to yell when radio advertisements take on scary voices (incredibly, often still Boris Karloff variations after all these years) when describing the latest “fangtastic” or “bootiful” deals on mid-price hatchbacks.
Then there’s the tyrannical rise of fancy dress, the worst sort of imposed “fun”. This is bad enough if you are making like a vampire or Freddy Krueger, but it is, apparently, now deemed appropriate to dress as, say, Princess Leia or a Super Mario Brother. A friend of mine, then living in the US, was, some years ago, asked what costume he was wearing for Halloween. He provoked a combination of offence and bafflement on telling workmates that he would spend October 31st as himself.
[ The Irish Times view on the meaning of Halloween: spooky storiesOpens in new window ]
All this reflects an increasing retreat into infantilism. It speaks of the need to all be doing the same thing at the same time. It demonstrates a near-complete supplication to corporate groupthink. You will buy, wear and dream Halloween until we tell you to stop. Then you will buy, wear and dream something else.
Here we get to the one good thing about the imposition and acceptance of the juvenile American variation on our once-eerie festival. The unofficial beginning of Halloween is the first day of October. From that point supermarkets are required to drape every second aisle in fake spider’s web and pumpkin-coloured tissue paper. Halloween-themed confectionery festers beneath.
All of this serves at least one important purpose. It keeps premature Christmas away for a few more weeks. Before Halloween became an inescapable fad, substantial bits of Yule regularly crept into retail spaces the moment the leaves turned brown. A flock of Christmas jumpers. A gaggle of selection boxes. Maybe a small flurry of advent calendars. Some of that stuff is, even now, already about, but you will have trouble locating it beneath the waves of jocular macabre flowing over every retail surface.
It’s a small thing to compensate for the bastardisation of a singular cultural phenomenon. But it’s something. Whisper that to yourself as you walk through the orange corridors.
