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Our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, watches with interest as Halloween celebrations today take on a life (or death!) all of their own.
It never used to be this way.
When I was growing up there were special occasions it was important to mark (such as Christmas), but Halloween wasn’t one of them.
Now though you see houses bedecked with spiders’ webs or bats EVERYWHERE, and events about Halloween even make the news in UK newspapers (especially if they involve cute animals!).
Greggs are offering a ‘Halloween biscuit’, and yesterday there was to be a ‘Ghost ship’ tour of Cardiff Bay.
One Welsh organisation sensed an opportunity, and summed it all up extremely well, declaring online: “Get ready for a spine-chilling adventure like never before at Gower Fresh Christmas Trees Farm!…But beware, from October 26th to October 31st, things take a terrifying twist. This year we have new adventures for you, new scary characters”.
Apart from selling goodies now (like trick-or-treat sweets which have to be kept at the door), this day has an important historical origin.
One theory holds that many Halloween ‘traditions’ were influenced by Celtic harvest festivals (particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain), which are believed to have pagan roots.
Some go further and suggest that Samhain may have been ‘Christianised’ as All Hallow’s Day, along with its eve, by the early Church.
Other academics think Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday – All Hallow’s Day.
This was celebrated for centuries in Ireland and Scotland, with Irish and Scottish migrants taking many Halloween customs to America in the 19th century.
Halloween then spread to other countries (such as Wales and England) by the late 20th and early 21st centuries through American influence.
Popular Halloween activities include trick-or-treating (or the related guising and souling), attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins or turnips into jack-o’-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.
Some practice the Christian observances of All Hallows’ Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead, although it is a secular celebration for others.
A few Christians abstain from meat on All Hallows’ Eve, a tradition reflected in the eating of certain vegetarian foods, including apples, potato pancakes, and soul cakes.
But none of this is exactly “…a spine-chilling adventure like never before…”
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when major events were always marked – but not Halloween!) as he was gripped by the incurable neurological condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – ‘From Russia without love again part three’, where Phil shows how horrified he is to see more evidence about Vladimir Putin tightening his control of Russia using torture and imprisonment, while journalists like him have often borne the brunt.
