I put up The Small Girl’s witch in an attempt to make it more than a Monday

More than any of the other Big Days, the Halloween you have largely depends on where you are in your life. I think the best Halloweens are probably the ones you have as a child. Not the ones I had, of course, because in the 1970s, the biggest novelty we had was central heating and the tradition of giving sweets to small children you didn’t know hadn’t yet been invented. Even if it had been, I’d have missed out — for some reason, my parents didn’t allow us to go out on Halloween, and so the fruit we feasted on that evening all came from our own kitchen.

That sounds a lot more miserable than it was: in the 70s, people didn’t eat a lot of fruit so having it for your actual tea was quite the treat. We didn’t like nuts, but my grandparents always brought us a net of monkey nuts which we enjoyed cracking open and staring at. And we did some dressing up, though the only ‘outfit’ I can now recall was my mother’s wedding dress, which my sisters and I took turns to wear, and I’m fairly certain that one year, my brother turned his zipped woolly cardigan inside out.

We bobbed for apples and tied them on strings and tried to retrieve two pence pieces from a basin of water, a game I’ve never heard anyone else speak of, which makes me wonder if my parents invented it in an effort to drown their children. Then we watched television and went to bed.

To be fair, my own children’s Halloweens were much better. When they were small, I always went a little bit mad on Halloween, designing and making the kind of costumes that could lead people who didn’t know me to believe I was a terrific mother. The Small Girl’s Corpse Bride is still talked about in reverential tones in this parish and The Boy’s Darth Vader really looked like Darth Vader even though it was entirely fashioned from refuse sacks and Cornflakes boxes.

Those were heady Halloweens, when all the kids on the road would traipse around together while a small group of parents straggled around behind them in witches’ hats, noting which neighbours were pretending not to be in so we could trash them later during the mammoth indoor drinking sessions that always followed the outdoors activities.

But even those halcyon days, I suspect, would pale into modesty alongside the current incarnation of the festival. Because it’s really gone gangbusters now, hasn’t it?

There are spiders big enough to frighten Éanna Ni Lamhna crawling up the front walls of houses in our estate, having apparently spun webs the postman could get lost in. Several of my neighbours appear to have turned into skeletons and moved into their own porches. Some have put up special spooky lights and the exterior of the Paint Pot looks like an homage to all the horror films, all at the same time.

If all that manufactured macabre wasn’t alarming enough, every primary school child has spent the last week industriously adding to the orange and black heap of horror. I don’t know if any actual teaching goes on in the week ahead of Halloween, but I’d wager that the only learning is that paper plates can be painted orange and made to look like spooky pumpkins.

All week, I’ve seen the little people emerge from the school down the road with armloads of ghoulish pictures and decorations to add to the hellish landscape. If a time traveller were to arrive anywhere in Ireland this weekend, they would assume they had landed in a post-apocalyptic zombie-ruled world (unless they’d come from America, in which case they’d just assume they were in, well, America.) So if you’re a little kid right now, tomorrow is probably the best Halloween ever. If you’re the parent of a little kid, it’s the second best Halloween. And if you’re the parent of people in their twenties, it’s Monday.

Maybe that’s why I put up decorations this year. Over the last few years, I haven’t bothered. Covid. My brother. Kids in their twenties. But this year, I dug out the bag of those old school drawings and decorations, and up they went. Our house is still probably the least scary on the road, but there’s a witch on the window of the porch that The Small Girl made in senior infants which is worth more than a whole dungeon of skeletons and there are enough orange paper plates on the kitchen walls to cater a 21st birthday party.

Because it turns out that it’s only Halloween if you make it. Otherwise, it’s just another manic Monday.