I'll fisk, and commnet on, this eventually-mike
Hallowe'en: no place for fun in a festival of fear
Exploitation for commercial gain and a licence for children to run amok are the remnants of this ancient tradition. William Langley is running for cover.
Halloween: The original and solemn intention of All Souls and All Saints Days which fall around this time has been overtaken by crassness
It will happen again, tonight. The doorbell will ring, and there, bathed in the orangey urban half-light, will stand a figure, ghastly of countenance and seething with evil intent. And looking hopefully at him, across the threshold, will be the local trick-or-treaters.
The bigger Hallowe'en gets, the less popular it becomes. Terror may stalk the streets, but it's not so much the undead as the un-budgeted-for that make the occasion really scary. This year, the revenues generated by our once-obscure and little-understood footnote to the liturgical calendar are expected to reach £300 million, overtaking those of Valentine's Day, and leaving Easter and Christmas as the only celebrations we spend more money on.
There are good reasons why Hallowe'en is expensive. In many British towns, the night of October 31 has been surrendered to the Toffee Apple Taliban, whose members will happily do unpleasant things to your house, car or cat if you don't pay them off.
The nation's supermarkets have become accomplished peddlers of kiddie-catching Hallowe'en novelties, with Tesco alone expecting to sell £55 million of merchandise, including 1.4 million pumpkins, 1.5 million costumes and two million toffee apples.
"This year, with Hallowe'en falling on a Sunday, our customers will be looking to celebrate all weekend," says Carolyn Bradley, the firm's UK marketing director. "The size of parties is steadily increasing, with 60 people now the norm, and there's an enormous demand for costumes."
Equally enormous is the demand for it all to go away. Britain appears to have imported the wretched excesses of American commercialisation without any of the underpinnings of tradition and wholesomeness that make Hallowe'en in the United States so enjoyable. While the US gets apple-cheeked children skipping past picket fences, we get lumbering oiks in Satan masks egging your windows.
This, say the Hallowe'en sceptics, is what happens when you try to reclaim something you should never have abandoned in the first place. Hallowe'en, in its most basic form, has its roots in ancient Britain. By the time the Romans arrived in 55 BC, elaborate commemorations of the dead were already well established. Julius Caesar records in his account of the Gallic wars that his officers were shocked by the savagery of these Celtic ceremonies, which included the building of effigies "of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of branches, they fill with living men and set on fire".
The direct forerunner of Hallowe'en is likely to have been the festival of Samhain, which in the early Celtic scheme of things signified the end of summer and the start of the "dark season". At this time of year, it was believed, the "wall" between the realms of the living and the dead was at its weakest, and the spirits could cross over. So, costumes and masks were worn as protection against evil.
According to Nicholas Rogers, a Canadian history professor, and author ofHallowe'en: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Samhain was slowly incorporated into the Catholic liturgical calendar and, in medieval Britain, became the precursor to All Saints Day, widely known as All Hallows Day, which was celebrated on November 1. The night of October 31 thus became All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe'en for short.
By the mid-18th century, Hallowe'en had developed a much more secular character, compounded, as Rogers depicts it, by a hefty dose of unruliness. "Mimicking the malignant spirits who were widely believed to be abroad on Hallowe'en," he writes, "gangs of youths blocked up chimneys, rampaged through cabbage patches, opened gates and unstabled horses." The authorities stamped out much of the delinquency, but Irish and Scottish immigrants carried remnants to America. Even
into the early 20th century, Hallowe'en in the big US cities could be a wild night.
into the early 20th century, Hallowe'en in the big US cities could be a wild night.
The modern, family-friendly, All American Hallowe'en didn't really arrive until the 1930s, when a national effort was made, headed by schools, police forces and local authorities, to transform it into a community-based festival aimed at children, and such trappings as pumpkin-carving, apple-bobbing and trick-or-treating were adopted. Britain, which had more or less forgotten about the whole occasion, was quite content to celebrate the not entirely dissimilar Guy Fawkes Night a few days later.
Today, though, the spooks are running the show and Guy Fawkes is toast. What happened? To some extent, the re-importation of Hallowe'en (minus most of its redeeming features) was inevitable. From Ray-Bans to Raisin Bran, we generally take what America sends us, and the prospect of there being good money to be made only gets it here faster.
Yet as long as Hallowe'en retained its image of kiddie-cute innocence, the British remained largely indifferent to it. The resistance only began to crumble with the success of John Carpenter's arty 1978 slasher movie Hallowe'en, which spawned a whole genre of big- and small-screen imitations and familiarised Britons with the paraphernalia of pumpkins and unsolicited house visits.
Never slow to spot a marketing opportunity, the big retailers realised that Hallowe'en could be a useful bolt-on to the big Christmas ker-ching, and began pushing Dracula capes and rubber spiders into the aisles. Whereupon the food industry caught on with Hallowe'en cakes, cookies and sweets slathered in black and orange – at which point, the nation's doorbells started ringing.
What to do? So urgent has the question become that Debrett's, the leading authority on social manners, now offers guidance. "Good manners are essential," says Jo Bryant, the company's head of etiquette. "Trick-or-treating should be used as an ice-breaker, not as a threat. Children should not be too greedy. If they are offered treats, make sure that they don't take too many and that they say thank-you." Advice that will no doubt be observed to the letter by tonight's masked hordes.
Sadly, Britain has still to get the hang of Hallowe'en. While there will be ghosts and ghouls in abundance, the true souls in torment will be on the other side of the door.
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