Bah, Pumpkin!
For the first time in a long time, we were home for Halloween and actually living in a place that gets trick-or-treaters. We had the usual array of fairies, superheroes and unidentifiable creatures. We also had a boy dressed as a golf course and a dog dressed as Zorro. The nice children took one piece of candy and said “Thank you,” while the rest took great handfuls and trudged on to their next unsuspecting victim in silence. The Halloween equivalent of Scrooge who resides within me was tempted to call the bluff of some of the visitors by requesting a “trick” rather than just handing over the “treats”. But I feared the eggs and toilet paper and anyway, that’s just one step away from sitting on the porch with a shotgun yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn, ya damn varmints!” and I really don’t want to go there.
Instead, that same Scrooge sat on the couch and bemoaned the commercialism of the whole thing and grumbled about how “very American” it is to go door-to-door expecting to be given something and how when I was a kid you dressed up as one of two potentially scary things, a ghost (holes cut into the least flowery bed sheet you could find), or a witch (black cardboard pointy hat and whatever black clothes you could find). If you went trick or treating it was for pocket change, not candy and you could expect to be sent packing from most homes. Still, you’d better have a couple of good tricks up your sleeve because there was always someone who would go for the trick option. As it turns out, the whole trick-or-treating thing has its roots in the good old UK.
In Celtic times the poor would go door-to-door begging for “Soul cakes” to eat in return for prayers for the safe passage of the souls of the donors’ loved ones. October being the Celtic New Year, it was thought that the souls of the dead roamed the earth looking for living bodies to possess and the Celts dressed in ghoulish costumes to ward away these evil spirits (something a fairy, a golf course, or a purple dinosaur is unlikely to do—well, the purple dinosaur, maybe). Likewise the carved lanterns stemmed from the legend of a man named Jack who tricked the devil up a tree and was thus denied access to either heaven or hell. He was however given a single ember to light his way, which for some unexplained reason, he kept in a turnip and hence, our childhood Jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips. No battery operated plastic pumpkins for us.
If you’ve ever tried to cook turnip (I can recommend it mashed together with potatoes and butter) you know how hard the damn things are to cut. Try carving one! To hollow out a turnip, you have to start with a very sharp and dangerous knife. Of course, we did them ourselves, I mean, whose parent has the time to sit and carve a turnip? We would work down in layers of about ¾ inch, by cutting a circular disc, then carving it into squares and cutting the squares out one at a time. We would proceed like this until our turnips were largely hollow, assuming your arm could hold up for that long. Then came the actual carving bit. There was no room for elaborate designs on a turnip. Just cutting out anything that remotely resembled triangular eyeholes was a feat. Still, the glorious reward of turnip carving was the smell of slow-roasting turnip as your candle burnt down to the bottom.
And that’s the spirit of Halloween (no pun intended) that I’m mourning the death of. It’s that no-stress, no expectations commemoration of an ancient tradition. It’s not the competition to get the most elaborate costume; it’s not trying to outdo all your neighbors with the giant animatronic spiders and realistic life-size witches; it’s not even competing with friends to get the biggest quantity or most sought-after candy. It’s about throwing on a sheet and being allowed out after dark. It’s about risking losing a finger carving a turnip and burning the stump on a real candle. It’s about overlooking the fact that ghosts, in general, seldom come with tiny roses printed on them.
Perhaps next year the Halloween Scrooge should just lock the door, turn out the lights and pretend to not be home.
Bah, Humbug!
Instead, that same Scrooge sat on the couch and bemoaned the commercialism of the whole thing and grumbled about how “very American” it is to go door-to-door expecting to be given something and how when I was a kid you dressed up as one of two potentially scary things, a ghost (holes cut into the least flowery bed sheet you could find), or a witch (black cardboard pointy hat and whatever black clothes you could find). If you went trick or treating it was for pocket change, not candy and you could expect to be sent packing from most homes. Still, you’d better have a couple of good tricks up your sleeve because there was always someone who would go for the trick option. As it turns out, the whole trick-or-treating thing has its roots in the good old UK.
In Celtic times the poor would go door-to-door begging for “Soul cakes” to eat in return for prayers for the safe passage of the souls of the donors’ loved ones. October being the Celtic New Year, it was thought that the souls of the dead roamed the earth looking for living bodies to possess and the Celts dressed in ghoulish costumes to ward away these evil spirits (something a fairy, a golf course, or a purple dinosaur is unlikely to do—well, the purple dinosaur, maybe). Likewise the carved lanterns stemmed from the legend of a man named Jack who tricked the devil up a tree and was thus denied access to either heaven or hell. He was however given a single ember to light his way, which for some unexplained reason, he kept in a turnip and hence, our childhood Jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips. No battery operated plastic pumpkins for us.
If you’ve ever tried to cook turnip (I can recommend it mashed together with potatoes and butter) you know how hard the damn things are to cut. Try carving one! To hollow out a turnip, you have to start with a very sharp and dangerous knife. Of course, we did them ourselves, I mean, whose parent has the time to sit and carve a turnip? We would work down in layers of about ¾ inch, by cutting a circular disc, then carving it into squares and cutting the squares out one at a time. We would proceed like this until our turnips were largely hollow, assuming your arm could hold up for that long. Then came the actual carving bit. There was no room for elaborate designs on a turnip. Just cutting out anything that remotely resembled triangular eyeholes was a feat. Still, the glorious reward of turnip carving was the smell of slow-roasting turnip as your candle burnt down to the bottom.
And that’s the spirit of Halloween (no pun intended) that I’m mourning the death of. It’s that no-stress, no expectations commemoration of an ancient tradition. It’s not the competition to get the most elaborate costume; it’s not trying to outdo all your neighbors with the giant animatronic spiders and realistic life-size witches; it’s not even competing with friends to get the biggest quantity or most sought-after candy. It’s about throwing on a sheet and being allowed out after dark. It’s about risking losing a finger carving a turnip and burning the stump on a real candle. It’s about overlooking the fact that ghosts, in general, seldom come with tiny roses printed on them.
Perhaps next year the Halloween Scrooge should just lock the door, turn out the lights and pretend to not be home.
Bah, Humbug!
posted by Lisa at 11:08 AM
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