The leaves are turning, the temperature is dropping, most of
the summer crops have gone to seed and the days are growing shorter, that can
only mean one thing: It is almost time for Samhain (pronounced
"sah-win"). What? You don’t celebrate Samhain? But it is the end of the harvest season, and
time to check your stores for the coming winter, and then on the 31st
dress in scary masks and make a large bonfire to attract insects which lure in
the bats all to appease the spirits rising from the dead so they don’t bring
sickness and ruin next year’s crops.
Well, what do you call that?
Yes, that’s pretty much where it all started. It was a Gaelic pagan tradition that evolved
with the spread of Christianity into All Hallows’ Eve that has its roots in the
practice of “souling.” Indigent
villagers would go house-to-house on Hallowmas (November 1) and in return for
some form of confectionary, would pray for the family’s deceased members on All
Soul’s Day (November 2nd).
The practice of souling or begging, started in medieval Ireland, but
spread through Britain and as far eastward as Italy. It infected Western Culture even to the point
of a 1593 Shakespeare reference in The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Speed accuses his master of "puling (whimpering)
like a beggar at Hallowmas."
The tradition that would eventually become
“Trick-or-Treating” immigrated to North America with the Irish influx during
the great Potato Famine in the mid-19th Century. But it would take generations before it would
take the form we all have come to know. The
first “American” celebrations, dating to the turn of the 20th
Century, were small parades of children dressed in costumes giving performances
in the early evening. This was known as
guising, and quickly became the genesis of receiving treats from merchants and
onlookers as a reward for their songs and dances. The trick part came much later, with the
first known print reference to the term “trick or treat” in 1930. Soon the practice of costumed children
receiving sweets grew (well, except during the sugar shortages of WWII) and
spread from North America back across the ocean into its ancestral Europe.
Adults, not wanting to be left out of the fun, started
“costuming” on Halloween at their favorite bars and pubs. Soon rewards for the “Best,” “Scariest,” and
“Most Original” costumes eroded the practice of donning funny makeup and
tattered clothes and grew into an American-sized industry of professionally
created costumes that range from gruesome, to political lampoon, to the aesthetically
sublime, to the raciest of vice and perversion. And with the combination of intoxicants and
the free-spirited absence of inhibitions from the anonymous disguises,
Halloween has spawned a Mardi Gras-like atmosphere of debauchery in many of the
most popular watering holes.
The Americanized Halloween (or Beggars’ Night as it is referred to in parts of Ohio, Iowa and
Massachusetts) is looked on with suspicion by many European countries, and the
expressed threat of “tricks” have spurred some police forces in the United
Kingdom to threaten to prosecute parents who allow their children to carry out
the "trick" element. In other
parts of Europe, the commerce-driven importation of Halloween is seen with even
more skepticism, and in light of numerous destructive or illegal "tricks,"
suspicions about this trick-or-treat game and Halloween in general have been further
raised.
It is sometimes fun to pull back the curtains of innocence
and peek at the naked roots of our ever evolving culture. A simple children’s holiday that rose from
the superstitions of zombie-like mischief-makers, to medieval pay-for-prayer
begging, to guising on parade, and finally the debaucheries of over-imbibed
adults, our commercialized version of Halloween now dominates the month of
October and marks the onset of the holiday season.
Happy Samhain, everyone!
