Halloween in another guise just isn’t Scots

HERE’S an eye-watering statistic for you: Americans will spend half a billion dollars this year on Halloween costumes. Not for themselves you understand. That’s just for their pets.

Of all the things the Americans have nabbed off the Scottish (Donald Trump, for example, they can happily keep), Halloween might be the one that rankles the most. After all, we were dooking for apples long before the good old US of A was even growing them.

And yet what passes for Halloween in Scotland today is a strangely Americanised monster that bears little resemblance to the Halloweens of my own childhood, and yours too, I expect. Scottish children no longer go guising but trick or treating.

The humble neep has long since been abandoned in favour of its garish orange cousin, the pumpkin. Even that endearingly archaic apostrophe, there to remind us that Hallowe’en itself is short for All Hallows Eve, has been phased out of existence.

In the States, meanwhile, Halloween is a multi-billion-dollar industry, a commercialised ‘holiday’ that thrives on cheap sugar, elaborate make-up and dogs dressed up like ladybirds. Which is fine as far as it goes.

After all, the North Americans have always done this: taken a traditional culture, ferried it across the ocean and given it their very own pizazz. I remember once on a trip to Nova Scotia visiting a museum with an exhibit devoted to something called ‘Scottish step dancing’. Later on I was invited to a ceilidh, which turned out to be a sit-down concert featuring a woman at a piano. Fair enough. Such is the rich tapestry created by emigration, and the fusion of cultures in a new and different land. But does it really have to go the other way? Can we not at least attempt to cling on to some of the traditions we hold dear instead of buying, wholesale, into what they’re selling us from across the pond?

This week there was the most terrible stushie in the US over whether or not ‘blackface’ Halloween costumes are racist. NBC TV presenter Megyn Kelly, one of the country’s highestpaid anchors, may now lose her job over comments in which she defended white people who want to dress up in outfits others may find offensive.

‘She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day?’ she said of one reality TV star who did just that last October. ‘I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween.’

It is, of course a serious issue, but it does amuse me no end that in amongst all the earnest discussion of what is and is not acceptable when selecting a costume, the biggest cultural appropriation of all, the Americanisation of a Scottish Halloween, rarely raises an eyebrow.

So maybe it’s time for us Scots to reclaim Hallowe’en ourselves. Stick that apostrophe back in there, ban trick or treating in favour of good old fashioned guising, and start slicing up a few turnips for our Jack o’lanterns.

Yes I know they’re difficult to carve, but we’re Scottish. Isn’t that the point?