Folklore faith and the childhood custom of guising.

For those of us brought up with Scottish guising in the 1950s, there was a difference between collecting a sweet and earning one. You had to give a turn. It might be a joke, a song, a recited poem or a tune played on an instrument. Usually we performed at the door, but sometimes we were invited into the warmth of the living room. Sweets or a few coins followed. The performance mattered. For a short while, the children had charge of the entertainment and the neighbours became their audience.

That custom belongs to a much longer history. You will often hear it told as a neat journey. An ancient Celtic festival becomes a Christian holy day, crosses the Atlantic and returns as “trick or treat”, wearing a supermarket mask and costume. Parts of that account are true. The trouble comes when the gaps are smoothed over. Religious observance, seasonal work, migration and commercial interests have all changed Halloween, while local names and habits have survived alongside them.

Ireland and Scotland have strong traditions associated with Samhain. Wales has Calan Gaeaf, and the Isle of Man has Hop-tu-Naa. Cornwall and Brittany belong in the comparison too, provided their customs are given their own histories. Winter draws these places together. So does the feeling that, on certain nights, the familiar world might admit something unexpected. The differences between their stories are often where the interest lies.

What the evidence allows.

Samhain is an Irish name associated with November and the beginning of winter. Halloween is Oíche Shamhna in Irish, with the closely related Oidhche Shamhna in Scottish Gaelic. In the traditional Irish calendar, Samhain was one of the major seasonal divisions, alongside Imbolc, Bealtaine and Lughnasa. The festival falls on 1 November, with celebrations on the preceding evening. Before anything else, this was a practical turning point. Cattle had to be cared for and food put by. Winter had consequences.

Older seasonal traditions lie behind later observances, but reconstructing an Iron Age ceremony is another matter. Medieval Irish stories reached us through Christian literate culture, often in manuscripts much later than the material they preserve. Older beliefs may be carried within them. You cannot read them as eyewitness reports of prehistoric ritual, or assume that every household believed what a storyteller described.

Folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries needs similar care. A remembered custom tells us what people practised or recalled at that time. Saying that it came from the druids adds a claim which needs evidence of its own. An attractive explanation can outlive the reasons anyone first believed it.

The once familiar picture of Samhain as a universal Celtic New Year and great annual feast of the dead owes much to the influential interpretations of John Rhys and James Frazer. More recent historical work has questioned how securely that picture rests on the earlier evidence. The winter turning is well attested. A single ancient religious system observed in the same way throughout the Celtic world is much harder to establish.

Even the word “Celtic” can lead you astray. Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx belong to the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages. Welsh, Cornish and Breton belong to the Brittonic branch. That relationship gives us a reason to compare their traditions, but it does not give all their speakers an identical past. Nor was Scotland wholly Gaelic. Scots-speaking Lowland communities have a substantial Halloween history of their own.

A night when the ordinary world gives way.

One medieval Irish story catches the unease well. In the Adventures of Nera, a challenge issued at Samhain sends a warrior out to a hanged corpse. The dead man speaks. He wants water. Nera later encounters an Otherworld where time does not behave as it does among human beings. Samhain is associated with access to the síd, the supernatural dwelling or mound, and the crossing is dangerous.

It is a story, though. Its value does not depend on treating it as a ceremony enacted across prehistoric Ireland. The tale brings together courtly adventure, domestic danger and a disturbing uncertainty about time. It tells us something about the medieval imagination without telling us everything about ancient religious practice.

The “thinning veil” is now a familiar way of describing Halloween. It is an effective image, but no verbatim ancient Celtic doctrine should be read into it. In stories and later folklore, the crossings often happen somewhere quite definite. A mound opens. A traveller meets a company on the road and realises too late that they should have stayed at home. The place has not changed. The hour has.

Think of the household threshold. On one side you have shelter and the people who belong there. On the other stands someone asking to be admitted. Disguise adds a small uncertainty, even when everyone knows perfectly well that the visitor is a neighbour’s child. Hospitality allows the stranger in, for a while and on understood terms. That is one way of reading the custom’s social meaning. It does not prove how the custom began.

Later Irish folklore brings the supernatural close to the hearth. A Leitrim account describes souls in purgatory visiting their living friends, for whom a fire and swept hearth were prepared. In Donegal, fairies were said to take people away. Those are very different visitors. Both beliefs were recorded in a Christian society, where ideas about the dead and the fairies could exist together without fitting neatly into one explanation.

There is tenderness in making ready for someone who has died. The prospect of abduction is another matter. Halloween could hold both. Call every unseen visitor an ancestor and you lose the danger. Call them all evil spirits and you lose the longing. A dead relative might be welcome when other presences were best kept outside.

Saints souls and the Christian calendar.

Halloween takes its name from Christianity. All Hallows’ Eve is the evening before All Saints’ Day on 1 November, a hallow being a holy person or saint. All Souls’ Day follows on 2 November. The dates sit together, but their purposes differ. In Catholic teaching, All Saints celebrates the saints in heaven, including those never formally canonised. On All Souls, prayer is offered for the faithful departed undergoing purification. The distinction concerns their spiritual condition, rather than their fame.

The calendar took centuries to develop. In Rome, the dedication of the Pantheon to Mary and the martyrs under Boniface IV in 609 or 610 was commemorated in May. The November feast became more widely established in the early medieval West, with Gregory IV associated with its extension in the ninth century. All Souls gained an influential annual observance through Odilo and the monasteries of Cluny in the eleventh century. The precise date of that development is disputed.

So the tale of a pope simply moving Halloween to suppress Samhain is too tidy. Saints were commemorated far beyond Gaelic-speaking lands, and the adoption of feast days followed complicated routes. Christian observance could absorb or accommodate local customs. That possibility does not establish why a particular date was chosen.

Medieval Christians had reasons of their own to think about the dead. Prayers and alms could help souls in purgatory, and the living retained duties towards those who had gone before them. English souling gave those duties a visible form. Visitors went from door to door and food was given in connection with prayers for the departed. The custom persisted into the twentieth century. You can see a resemblance to later treat collecting, although resemblance cannot supply every missing link between the two.

The Reformation altered that religious setting. Where purgatory was rejected, the doctrinal basis for relieving souls after death was rejected too, and All Souls lost its place in Protestant observance. Ghost stories were less easily abolished. People continued to report strange encounters, even as the religious explanations available to them changed. An amusement might also survive after the belief once attached to it had weakened.

Christian remembrance is still varied. In Anglican worship, All Saints and All Souls can express a belonging in Christ that continues beyond death. All Souls allows a more intimate remembrance of people personally known and loved. Resurrection and communion are at the centre of that understanding. A family welcoming a dead relative to the hearth may express a similar longing, but the belief and the act are different.

Prayer for the dead, an invitation to ancestral spirits and a charm to glimpse a future husband each ask something different of the unseen. They need not be made equivalent for us to understand why people found them compelling. Uncertainty is hard to bear. Each offers a way of approaching it.

England and the neighbouring November feast.

England had its own Christian observances and regional customs. It was not waiting for a twentieth-century import to introduce the idea of Halloween. Souling makes that plain. It also gives the English comparison a particular religious history, with prayers for departed souls providing a documented reason for giving food at the door.

Then there is 5 November. Parliament’s Thanksgiving Act of January 1606 established annual services and sermons commemorating deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot. Bonfire Night has a political and religious history which cannot simply be folded into an account of Samhain. The two occasions share a season. That does not make their fires evidence of the same ancient rite.

For an English child, and for many Scottish children, Halloween and Bonfire Night can belong to the same run of dark evenings. Historically, a fire recalling a failed attack on king and Parliament carried different associations from one believed to offer protection against spirits. You might see similar flames and hear quite different stories about why they were burning.

Scotland and the company of the fireside

Burns gives us a Scottish Halloween well before the modern doorstep circuit. His “Halloween”, published in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, follows an Ayrshire gathering occupied with courtship, divination and fright. The fairies of its opening inhabit named local places. They belong to somewhere people could point out.

The poem’s notes explain the customs. Participants pull kail stalks with their eyes shut, reading a prospective spouse’s shape and disposition from the plant. Earth clinging to the root promises money. Nuts named for a couple are placed by the fire, where their behaviour is supposed to reveal how the relationship will fare. Other experiments take people into dark and lonely places, with ample scope for a fright or a foolish mistake.

The curiosity is familiar enough. These games let people talk about attraction, money and marriage without quite declaring themselves. You can blame the nut for giving away your feelings. Laughter follows, but laughter alone does not tell us how much the participants believe. A joke can be enjoyed while a doubtful eye is kept on the fire.

Burns has made a poem, not conducted a census. Even so, he gives us a late eighteenth-century account of customs more precise than an undated statement about “the Celts”. His comedy matters too. Whatever solemn explanations we now attach to the occasion, these people were capable of enjoying themselves.

Gaelic Scottish traditions include Samhainn bonfires, carved turnip lanterns and fuarag, a mixture of toasted oats and cream in which tokens could be hidden to predict the future. Guisers might earn treats with jokes. The practices varied by place. They should not be assembled into a national ceremony that every Scottish household supposedly followed.

Bonfires brought people together outdoors. In folklore they could offer protection, but a gathering might also involve warmth, spectacle and competition with the neighbours. The fire cannot explain its own history. Nor can a disguise. Protection against spirits is one traditional explanation for dressing up, while anonymity and mischief offer pleasures people scarcely need to be taught.

A carved tumshie has a severity of its own. The pumpkin gives you a generous hollow and room for a broad grin. A hard root is less accommodating. Its face can look pinched, almost affronted. You can be fond of that expression without claiming to know how far back the lantern’s history reaches. An old-looking object is not necessarily an ancient one.

Ireland and the uncertain visitor.

Irish Halloween belongs in the kitchen as much as in the haunted landscape. Colcannon, boxty and báirín breac, or barmbrack, were among its festive foods. Tokens hidden in the cake could predict marriage, wealth or a change of fortune. The ring remains the best-known example. In Scotland, the fruit dumpling with a silver sixpence buried in it offered a similar pleasure. Someone would find the coin, and the whole company had something to discuss.

Other predictions were less comfortable. In a Mayo game, a blindfolded player chose among saucers holding a ring, clay and water. The choices signified marriage, death or travel abroad. Those possibilities belonged close to family life. Marriage could make a household, while emigration might empty it. There was no need to explain the fear of death. What looks quaint from a distance could touch a real anxiety.

The púca belongs to the season’s more unruly folklore. Fairy places were avoided and protective objects carried against supernatural danger. A familiar landscape could therefore contain places where you ought not to linger, particularly after dark. Knowing the district meant knowing its warnings as well as its roads.

House visiting differed within Ireland. Disguised visiting was especially strong in the eastern half of the island, and a Dublin account describes songs and instrumental music rewarded with apples, nuts and money. An older appeal asked people to help the Halloween party. “Trick or treat” has not always been the wording at the door.

Nor does one religious or linguistic tradition speak for the whole island. Communities north and south of the border have different histories, and neither Catholic observance nor the Gaelic language defines every Irish family’s experience. Local records give us feasting, visiting and supernatural unease in particular places. We lose something when those differences are rubbed out.

Wales and the last person by the bonfire.

Calan Gaeaf names the beginning of winter in Wales, with Nos Calan Gaeaf as its eve. The name allows a comparison with Samhain without borrowing an Irish word for the Welsh occasion. Agricultural work was drawing to a close. Harvest hospitality and preparations for winter supplied a setting that would have been readily understood across neighbouring regions.

Welsh ghost lore makes the crossing points visible. Spirits might be seen at stiles at midnight. The ladi wen, or white lady, and the hwch ddu gwta, the tailless black sow, were among the feared beings. In traditions associated particularly with north Wales, people hurried home as the bonfire died, lest the sow catch the last person to leave.

You can imagine how the fear might sharpen once the others had gone. While the fire burns and the company stays together, the story is entertainment. Afterwards there is the road home. A little doubt may follow you down it.

The black sow is a useful reminder that Halloween was not everywhere an affectionate welcome for ancestors. Her threat differs from that of a dead relative visiting the hearth. A shared season has produced different stories. Calling every figure a “Celtic spirit” tells us very little about any of them.

Manx songs Cornish apples and Breton death.

Hop-tu-Naa makes the Isle of Man a close companion to Scottish guising. House visiting with songs and rewards remains part of its tradition, along with children carrying carved turnips. Marriage divination involved such things as a dumb cake or salted herring. Singing has a central place in the occasion, rather than being an optional extra before the sweets are handed over.

The familiar Jinny the Witch song has its own changing history. It formed part of a wider repertoire, and the material collected in the nineteenth century was not identical to what many children sing now. Traditions can change from one generation to the next while continuing to feel familiar. The best-known version is not necessarily the oldest.

The island is a Crown Dependency, outside the United Kingdom. Its place here rests on language, culture and the seas connecting it to its neighbours. Those relationships are clearer when the political geography is kept straight.

Cornwall offers a more local comparison through Allantide. Large red Allan apples were sold in Penzance and St Ives and associated with customs in far western Cornwall. We should not give every Cornish parish the same tradition on the strength of that record. More recent apple-themed events show Allantide being consciously renewed as well as remembered.

Present-day celebrations can add their own religious meaning. At the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, ancestral remembrance has included a place for the departed at a shared meal. That tells us about a modern observance. It does not establish that every part of the meal was practised centuries earlier, when Cornish was more widely spoken in everyday life.

Brittany needs similar care. Its death traditions offer a comparison with Allhallowtide, but do not establish a Breton version of Irish Samhain. The Ankou, associated with death in Lower Brittany, appears in Christian art as well as folklore. A seventeenth-century wooden figure survives from Saint-Mathieu in Morlaix. Ossuaries, bones and reminders of mortality have also occupied a conspicuous place in the Breton religious landscape.

An ossuary makes the presence of the dead quite tangible. So can the Ankou, given a local character within a wider Christian contemplation of mortality. The figure does not need to be promoted into a prehistoric god to command attention. An evocative label such as “Celtic Halloween” cannot take the place of a particular history.

Across the Atlantic and back again.

American influence has done much to shape modern Halloween. That does not make the occasion an American invention imposed on people who had never heard of it. Irish and Scottish migrants carried customs with them. In North America those customs encountered different communities, patterns of town life and opportunities for business.

Domestic Halloween parties were prominent around the beginning of the twentieth century. Trick-or-treating became more widely established later, especially after the post-war baby boom. The doorstep circuit you now recognise was not always the centre of the holiday.

Pumpkins became the dominant lanterns. Packaged sweets and manufactured costumes made a large celebration easier to supply, while film and television provided monsters, then a much broader cast of characters. A whole atmosphere could be bought. That changes an occasion once put together from what happened to be in the house.

Something can be lost along the way. Local words and stories are easily displaced by familiar screen images, and choosing a costume from a rack asks less of you than inventing one. Still, nobody should have to dress a child poorly to prove their attachment to tradition. A bought costume can give delight. The person answering the door can be just as generous with a bowl of packaged sweets.

Heritage attractions take part in the modern trade as well, offering pumpkin activities, ghost tours and seasonal events. Manx celebrations combine turnip carving with songs, food and storytelling. Charging admission does not, on its own, make an event hollow. What matters is whether people are helped to take part in something they can recognise as belonging to that place.

Modern Pagan observance has brought further religious meanings to Samhain. Seasonal change, reflection and the sharing of harvest abundance can be taken seriously within a living faith. Such observance deserves respect on its own terms. An unbroken line back to antiquity need not be proved before a renewed practice can mean something to the people who follow it.

Making the disguise and dooking for apples.

For many children, Halloween began well before the first door was knocked. The outfit had to be made. Making it from scratch often meant finding a new use for whatever the house could spare. Adult clothes were borrowed and altered. Cardboard became a mask, sometimes cut from a cereal packet. An oversized coat changed the shape of the child inside it, and an unfamiliar hat helped complete the deception. Each household worked with what was available.

Faces were blackened with soot as another form of disguise. Familiar features became harder to pick out, and the neighbour might have to look twice before recognising the child. The effect was rough and ready. That was part of the pleasure. Clothes you associated with a parent or grandparent looked quite different once a child had put them on and gone out into the night.

Then there was the neep. Children hollowed out the hard flesh and cut eyes and a mouth through the shell, leaving room for a candle inside. It was stubborn work. Younger children might need help from an adult, especially with the hardest cutting. When the candle was lit, the face at last became a lantern. You had made the thing you carried.

Indoors, apples floated in a basin of water for “dunking”, usually called “dooking” in Scots. Your hands stayed out of the game. You had to catch an apple with your teeth, which sounded simple until the fruit bobbed away from your face. Bite successfully and you could lift it clear. Miss, and a wet face might be your reward, accompanied by laughter from those awaiting their turn.

The costumes, lanterns and games gave children a hand in making the evening. There was work to be done and something to try, even when you were not very good at it. At the basin, everyone could see the difficulty. At the neighbour’s door, it would be your turn to provide the entertainment.

The turn that earned the treat.

In the Scottish guising of my childhood, we dressed up and went from house to house. Each child gave a song, poem, joke or another turn and received sweets, coins or other treats. My four younger brothers and I all had musical abilities. We tended to favour the “posher” houses, where there was often a piano. That is clear in my memory, and it helps explain why “trick or treat” still feels an incomplete description of what we were doing.

The pause before the reward made the difference. Adults waited while a child got ready to begin, and a doorway or living room became a small stage. The joke did not have to be particularly good. We were doing our own sort of stand-up comedy, though we would scarcely have called it that. Even a modest turn meant offering something of yourself.

There was no need to calculate the value of a poem against a handful of sweets. The household agreed to listen and to be kind about what it heard. A reward followed, but you had already been given an audience. For a child, being heard could matter quite as much.

Modern trick-or-treating can keep much of that pleasure. Children still dress up, approach a door and invite someone to join the game. A smile counts. When the visit is reduced to a familiar phrase and a quick handover, though, there is less time for an encounter of your own. You can regret that without deciding that today’s children have less imagination.

Older guising should not be turned into a lesson about children having to deserve their sugar. There must be room for the shy bairn, the child who forgets the words and the one who cannot comfortably perform. An invitation to give a turn becomes something meaner if it is treated as an examination. The kindness matters more than the standard of the act.

Look across the neighbouring traditions and you find other exchanges. Irish visitors sang for apples and money. Manx children had their songs, while English souling could offer prayer in return for food. They share the idea that a visitor might bring something as well as receive it. Their histories remain distinct, but the family resemblance is worth noticing.

You can keep that part of guising without banning a pumpkin or objecting to a bought mask. Give a child time for a verse, a tune or a joke. Listen. Let the reward include the attention you have paid.

Halloween has left us many ways of meeting uncertainty. A warrior enters a mound. A household makes ready for a dead friend, while a company leaves the Welsh bonfire rather quickly. At a Scottish door the worry may be no greater than whether the joke will land. For the child about to tell it, that can be quite enough. The door opens and someone makes room. For a moment, the night belongs to the guiser.