The harvest is in, the days are getting colder, the nights shorter and clock hands roll back one hour. Is it any wonder that we begin to speculate on the dark side. It seems to be part of the human condition, to ponder darkness when all is light. Afterall, the larders are full, the rooves waterproof, yards tidy, and yet our minds are uneasy. It is a time to rest, but instead we contemplate death and terrify ourselves with stories of sinister ghouls, ghosts, and creatures from the underworld. Maybe these tall tales are the equivalent to an emotional roller-coaster, cheap thrills for people not yet ready to face the harsh realities of the Winter neigh upon us. Or maybe it is something more, the primal need to imagine the darkest pathways of our minds. Maybe we are investigating ourselves when checking the porous boundaries between good and evil, wondering how firmly we believe what we think we believe, and what it would take to turn us from half-way civilized to barking mad barbarians. (Sorry to those who are offended by the word, I realize that your beard-sprouting tribe is merely a fashion victim tribe, not an empire smashing one.)
Sifting through our folklore, one can only wonder at the almost limitless boundaries of our Celtic ancestors and ask which mushrooms they were taking when inventing the Pooka, a shape shifting figure of a sinister nature. But then, even our fairies are sinister. My grand mother would never say that a baby was beautiful, just in case the fairies were listening. As they could not have children of their own, they resorted to stealing them. The Red man, a Leprechaun on steroids, kidnapped people late at night and carried them off to his secret hiding place in a red sack. He then beat them until the sun was ready to rise, when he released his prey with no memory of what had happened to them. There are others, many others, but all come with a warning, stay away from the netherworld, nothing good ever comes from there.
Knowing this, as Halloween approached, our ancestors recognised the danger of this night, when spirits roamed the earth with malice on their minds. They took precautions, lit lanterns in windows and wore disguises to trick the spirits as they walked among us. They were not stupid men and women, our ancestors, they knew evil abounded and took precautions against it. So, be warned, dress yourselves up as an evil spirit, least you are recognised as human and become the host for a lost soul in need of a warm body.
There is ample proof that Halloween originated in Ireland before emigrating to the US with the starving hordes of the nineteenth century. There, it and the Irish thrived, before the celebrations were returned to us as an American festival. But sadly, their festival is only a cartoon version of our own, a children’s festival, a ‘Halloween Light,’ a ‘No-Cal,’ emotional event with nothing to engage the imaginings of a slightly depressive Irish person, who has only a candle for light, a turf fire for heat and a glass of poitin for spiritual guidance. God knows what answers will come to such a person if left to their own devices. Better for them to join a crowd, to play music on the fiddle maybe, bang heels in time to a dance tune and listen to soulful, traditional melodies sung late into the night. If nothing else the noise may keep the spirits away for another year and keep all here, in middle earth, safe until they return once more.
It will not come as a surprise to anybody who knows me, that my main interest in Halloween is food related. The barmbrack caught my imagination early, as it seemed to be more of a storage unit than a foodstuff. As a child, I loved fruitcake and was puzzled by a cake that one had to sift through before eating. Nowadays, the tradition of filling the barmbrack with greaseproof covered gifts might seem crazy, but to any child of my generation it was a given. The fruit bread was more treasure trove than cake.
Barmbracks were also traditionally fortune tellers whose palms you did not have to cross with silver. They came laden down with discreet packages. There was the ring, which foretold marriage. Every year my sisters used the barmbrack as a supersized pincushion while they stabbed it to discover the metallic sound they hoped indicated where the ring might be found. Of course, they might only discover the penny, which meant wealth. Not as warm-blooded as the man of your dreams, but for me, in truth, it was what I was looking for. No one wanted the cloth. This meant poverty. But what about the matchstick, the unluckiest omen of them all, the harbinger of Death, wood representing a coffin. And in our childish way, we thrilled at the thought of people chocking on the matchstick, thus immediately fulfilling the prophesy. Chances were though, that you discovered it halfway through chewing on your slice of cake and simply lost a filling rather than your life. Though in many cases the matchstick was as easy to swallow as the stalks left in the dried fruit. In fact with the cheaper barmbracks, you could easily eat the matchstick and hardly notice, because the cake was nothing more than fruity sawdust. Sadly, the tradition of making cheap barmbracks persists, decent ones are expensive, baking your own might be an idea.
Ignoring bangers and bonfires and the howling of dogs driven mad by the noise, the best way to celebrate Halloween is to sit in a darkened room and curl up with a scary book. The taller the tale the better. The further it stretches the imagination, the more likely you are to gain an insight into your own darkest secrets and desires. Let your inner monsters roam the channels of your mind, let them scare you, let the goosebumps stand out proud. It is only one night after all. Everything will be forgotten with the dawn, the monsters put to bed, your fears purged. However, your feelings of foreboding may have deeper foundations than you realize. Your feelings that reality has lost its footing is nearer the truth than you might like to admit. Perhaps, even as you wake up to the lingering smell of bangers on the air, you feel the shift. Like the hero in a horror film, bloody and limping from the carnage of the night before, there is still that dread that evil has only been temporarily put in its place. Your suspicions are correct. Hell on earth is about to break free. The most evil of spirits, faux humans from the marketing industry, have organized a media coup. As of November 1st you will bombard by Christmas advertisements for the next two months. Somehow this is a scarier thought than anything dreamed up by our ancestors to spook us as the spirits roamed the earth on Halloween.