It’ll do our children no harm to forgo this trick-or-treat travesty BRENDA POWER

MISSING out on Halloween, some parents reckon, is a bigger blow to the country’s youngsters than the prospect of a scaled-down Christmas. Santa Claus is still going to make his rounds, after all, so as far as they’re concerned it’ll be pretty much business as usual.

The fact that their parents won’t be partying till the small hours, fussing over fiddly canapés to impress the visitors, and stressing about gift lists for rarely seen relatives will actually be a bonus for smaller citizens: the ungrateful little wretches don’t appreciate the fact that we do it all for them, right?

But Halloween really is all about the children – or at l east, that’s what this bland, commercialised, American-import version of the festival has become.

So this year they won’t be able to go ‘trick or treating’, basically extorting goodies from the neighbours with menaces, and they won’t be able to show off their shop-bought costumes at end-of-term parties? Well, boo-hoo. Spare us the whingeing because your little darlings can’t wear masks and eat sweets; most of us have done little else since last March.

Instead of indulging in hand-wringing over a minor disappointment for our largely pampered and mollycoddled youngsters, we really ought to take this opportunity to re- i ntroduce them to the hard-core Halloween that their parents and grandparents knew.

Fearsome

It was a serious business for generations past, a chastening ‘memento mori’ when you took stock of your mortality and made your peace with the spirits who were, so the ancient I ri sh believed, closer at this time of year than any other. Samhain, the original festival first celebrated 2,500 years ago, wasn’t about mocking the dead; it was about appeasing them, acknowledging them and, most of all, encouraging them to stay on their side of the flimsy veil.

Scooped-out turnip heads, the forerunner of pumpkins, were designed to scare away evil spirits by looking even more f earsome, and ‘ bone f i r es’ disposed of dried- out potato stalks, barley stubble and the bones of animals slaughtered and cured for winter fare.

I remember Halloweens past as genuinely eerie and atmospheric nights, not the over-processed, over-commercialised chocolateand-slasher-movie fests they’ve become for our own kids.

Families stayed at home, told ghost stories and played ‘fortune-telling’ games that were not for the faint-hearted. My granny would set out saucers on the kitchen table and place a different object into each: a ring, a coin, some water, a pinch of clay. We were then blindfolded and led towards the table to pick a saucer. The r i ng meant marriage within the year (a scary prospect at age seven, but we dealt with it), water meant a journey, the coin meant riches… and the clay meant death.

Nobody worried much about triggering your micro-anxieties in those days. The traditional Halloween meal was colcannon studded with small wrapped packages that, again, predicted your future. This time, a matchstick meant death – if Granny didn’t get you with the saucers, she’d catch you with the supper.

If you looked in a candlelit mirror at midnight, so the legend went, you’d see the face of your future spouse – a thoroughly terrifying thought.

An apple was strung from the ceiling and you tried to bite it with hands behind your back (impossible, don’t bother) or you almost drowned ducking for nuts and small coins in the bottom of a basin of water.

By t he end of a proper Halloween night you were soaked, fighting with the siblings who cheated at the snap-apple and the ducking, and terrified to turn out the bedroom light in case some stranger appeared in your mirror.

One year, my younger brother and I decided we’d introduce the neighbours in r ural south Kilkenny to the new American custom of ‘trick or treat’.

We dressed up in old white sheets with eyeholes cut out, and set off after dark to peer in farmhouse windows and cadge nuts and apples.

Thunder

Heading down the very first lane, we met our dad driving out with a face like thunder.

It turned out there had been a death in that house, and he’d just left the wake… we hid out in the barn until he went to bed, and decided it might be safer to stick with snap- apple and saucers in future.

The modern Halloween has been scrubbed of all true supernatural elements, sanitised and sugar- coated beyond recognition. It was once a time to dwell on life’s great mysteries, to feel the proximity of the next world at a threshold in the year, and to acknowledge that death and decay are as much a part of nature’s cycle as green shoots and summer crops.

If modern kids have to manage without mountains of sweets and elaborate fancy dress costumes for one year, and rediscover traditional games and customs, it’s not going to kill them… Just to be on the safe side, though, maybe don’t put out the saucer with the clay.