Halloween, La Catrina in Oakland

I've told everyone who will listen that Halloween is an Irish contribution to American culture, a survival of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, brought across the Atlantic by Irish immigrants and transformed into the holiday we celebrate today. I believed it, just another contribution from the Irish to American civilization.

So before writing this, I did a little research, just to confirm what I know already. It turns out that Halloween as we celebrate it is a thoroughly American holiday, a wonderful mash-up of traditions brought here by people from many different countries.  We Irish contributed our bit, the date in particular, but contrary to what I believed, we don't own Halloween.

For a less biased account of the holiday, I recommend Stephen Winick's post in the Library of Congress Folklife blog, Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!. It describes a custom in New York, Philadelphia, and the Northeast of children dressing up on Thanksgiving and going door to door asking for treats, a practice already well established in the nineteenth century. No Irish element to it.   

Samhain, celebrated at the end of October, marks the end of summer and the beginning of the dark half of the year. The harvest was done, the sheep brought down from the hills, and people began to settle in for the winter. It is a turning point in the year itself, one in Oakland we can't help but notice. The days are getting shorter. Summer is gone. It's chilly and soon we'll be going to work in early morning light and coming home in the dark.

For the Irish, Samhain is a dangerous time. The curtain between this world and the Otherworld dissolves. The dead walk the streets. Banshees, púcas, headless horsemen, witches, and the Aos Sí, the people of the fairy mounds, wander among the living. Fairies can kidnap people, particularly handsome children, and replace them with changelings. 

Irish fairies are powerful, unpredictable beings, sometimes malicious, and certainly deserving of respect. Disguising oneself is a way of hiding from the fairies.  It’s also possible some of the creatures knocking on your door this Saturday aren't children at all.  The fairies are among us.

Dressing up, making noise, frightening away spirits, and celebrating the change of seasons are hardly exclusive to the Irish.

The English have their mummers performing in masks, Morris dancers, and Guy Fawkes Night with bonfires and kids running wild. In the Fall, particularly Halloween there are apple games, bobbing for apples, firing off shotguns to scare away evil spirits and offering drinks to the apple trees in hopes of a good harvest.

Elsewhere in Europe, masking and begging are familiar seasonal activities. German Fasching, although celebrated between winter and spring, offers the same opportunity for disguising yourself, acting like a fool, and escaping the ordinary rules of respectable behavior.  There’s also Mardi Gras and Carnival. 

Mexico's Día de los Muertos brings another tradition into the picture, a blending of Indigenous beliefs about death and ancestors with the Catholic observances of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls. The three holy days coincide with much older pagan observances.   

What all these traditions share is something more basic than a common ancestry. People everywhere confront the changing seasons, the darkness, the uncertainty of winter, and the mystery of death. They respond with feasting, costumes, fire, music, laughter, and sometimes wild behavior.

And Americans, with our mixture of peoples and traditions, have made something new out of all of it.

When I was growing up in Southern California in the 1950s, Halloween was primarily a children's holiday. We dressed up, went from door to door, and collected candy, with an occasional nickel or dime thrown in.

We had to wait until dark to go out. That was important. The younger children went first. Then came the older kids, and finally the teenagers, who were often more interested in tricks than treats.

Some tricks were just outright vandalism. Halloween was and is an opportunity to rebel against adult authority, to ignore the rules. Sometimes the results are funny, sometimes destructive, and sometimes just plain mean.

There's something in human nature, particularly when people are young. We rebel, we break the rules, we don't have to do what old people want all the time. Halloween almost tolerates vandalism and tricks, and for some it goes too far. Maybe that's the point.

The threat is right in the words: trick or treat. Give us something, or you may regret it.

Back in the day, one of the costumes was a hobo; old clothes, dirt on the face, a battered hat, and a bundle on a stick. I think that is a holdover from the ragamuffins of the nineteenth century and from the 1930s.

Those children dressed as beggars and tramps, going door to door asking for pennies, apples, or other treats. The Library of Congress article makes the case that these Thanksgiving customs contributed to the development of American trick-or-treating in the 1930s. After World War II, with the baby boom and suburban expansion, it became the great children's holiday I remember.

Of course, you don't have to persuade an eight-year-old to dress up and collect free candy. It's a custom that sells itself.

Something else I like about trick-or-treating is just a little bit it redistributes wealth.

Here in Oakland, children from less prosperous neighborhoods sometimes travel up the hill to Montclair or to Piedmont, where the houses are bigger and the candy is better. Kids have always known where the good candy is. Word gets around quickly when somebody is handing out Reese's Peanut Butter Cups instead of the cheap stuff.

Occasionally a skinflint complains about children coming from outside the neighborhood, but most people tolerate the children and some neighborhoods welcome them.

There's no income qualification for trick-or-treating. Poor children can beg from rich people, rich children can beg from other rich people, and everybody gets something. For one evening, adults are expected to give, and children are entitled to ask.

It's ritualized begging, and I think it's a good custom. The gifts are small, but the generosity is real.

Halloween has changed since my childhood. It's now a major holiday for adults as well as children, with elaborate costumes, parties, decorations, and commercial haunted houses. In some neighborhoods, organized gatherings have replaced going door to door. People complain that Halloween isn't what it used to be.

Well, of course it isn't. The Halloween of my childhood wasn't the Halloween of the nineteenth century.

Traditions survive by changing. Each generation takes what it inherits and makes it its own.

The goblins, ghosts, hobos, and fairies wandering our streets are all visitors from the past, although some may be more real than others. At Samhain, the curtain between our world and the Otherworld dissolves, and the inhabitants of both worlds roam freely.

I still like to think the Irish gave Halloween some of its most interesting creatures. We certainly know the dangers of the fairy folk.

And if a banshee knocks on your door this Saturday night, I'd suggest giving her a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Maybe she's a child in a costume. Maybe not.