The shops have been telling me since the first week of September that Halloween is coming. Skeletons in the garden centre. Plastic spiders next to the biscuits. A pumpkin the size of an armchair, priced like a weekend away. I stood looking at it over my first coffee of the day and wondered when exactly we all agreed to do this.
Because it isn’t just Halloween, is it? It’s everything. Children’s leavers’ parties now arrive by stretch limousine. A sixteenth birthday needs a hired venue, a photographer and a cake with its own postcode. There are baby showers, gender reveals and, in a few weeks, Black Friday, a sale named after a Thanksgiving we don’t even have. We’ve taken an entire American calendar and stuck it on the fridge, without anybody asking whether we’d like to keep any of our own dates.
In my day, the end of October meant a turnip. A proper one, hard as a cricket ball, and a whole evening with a spoon and a great deal of muttering, to produce a lantern that looked less like a face than a bad-tempered potato. Then, five days later, Bonfire Night. A fire in a field, a sparkler writing your name in the dark, a baked potato blackened to the point of geology, and a guy made from old clothes. Nobody hired a venue. A sixteenth birthday was a cake, the family round the table and a card with a tenner in it, and you were perfectly happy.
Now, before anyone writes in, I’m not blameless. I have bought the bag of fun-size sweets for the trick-or-treaters. Fun size, for the record, is a phrase invented by somebody who has never seen that bag at nine o’clock at night. By the time the first knock comes, half of it has mysteriously gone. I have also stood in the supermarket aisle thinking it would be rude not to buy a pumpkin. And I like Americans, I really do. They throw a party as if they mean it. It’s the rest of us I’m suspicious of, for following along without asking where the party’s going.
Then, over my second coffee, something stopped me. Halloween isn’t even American to begin with. It grew, at least in part, out of the old Gaelic festival of Samhain, and children in Scotland and Ireland were guising, dressing up and performing for a treat, long before anyone said “trick or treat”. Those families carried the custom across the Atlantic, where the turnip lost out to the pumpkin because pumpkins were plentiful and far easier to carve. So we’re not copying. We’re getting our own homework back, with glitter on it.
Which makes me think the problem was never the borrowing. We’ve always borrowed. The problem is forgetting what we already had. So here’s my modest proposal. Enjoy the pumpkin this weekend, hand out the sweets, and say well done to the small witch on the doorstep. Then on the fifth of November, give Bonfire Night a proper go too, at a decent organised display. Not because it’s better, but because traditions only survive when somebody bothers to turn up. It might as well be us.
Anyway, what do I know?
I’m just a grumpy old man.
Go on then, what’s yours? Tell me which imported tradition has got you reaching for a stronger coffee this week.
