The apostrophe having dropped out of the word Halloween is something that would concern me inordinately if I thought it were due to grammatical dereliction. In that case, it would be up there, on a par with potatoe’s and other abominations in my line of fire. But the omission of the little punctuation mark in this case signals something altogether more sinister: the erasure of history! How many kids who dress up as spooks on the last day of October know that the origin of their capers lies in a Christian feast day? And what is the relevance of spiders to this ritual?
One of the
benefits of living in a block of flats is that your door is generally
inaccessible to trick-or-treaters but, on this last occasion, I did not escape
scot-free from the intrusive shenanigans. The flat in which I took refuge is in
the centre of Manchester, where it was not children who caused a nuisance, but
adult revellers in the streets, whose noisy, drug and alcohol-fuelled antics went
on until dawn, as did the sound of sirens from the emergency vehicles
dispatched to rescue them from self-harm. How many of them were out celebrating
the eve of All Hallows Day? What even is “All Hallows”? Well, in modern
parlance, it translates as all things holy, or “all saints,” according to
ecclesiastical practice. You would never have guessed that from the goings-on in
Manchester.
The present
form of Halloween, largely the business of children, originated in the USA and was
adopted here only lately. Boomers like me have no recollection of pumpkins
featuring in our childhood. We might have been aware, to a greater or lesser
extent, of the mark on the religious calendar, but nobody dressed as ghosts. It’s
not surprising that we can’t bring ourselves to embrace the artificial and
apparently random spookification of All Hallows. It adds nothing of value to
our lives (unless we’re in the fancy dress business). To the contrary, it erases
an aspect of our social history, already fading in the light of secularism.
Lest my tone
be mistaken as advocating against American social imports, I should point out
that my generation enthusiastically adopted rock’n’roll (apostrophes and all),
though by then, of course, we had pretensions to adulthood and were on the cusp
of becoming paying consumers. One assumes that it is the parents of today who
provide the wherewithal to kit-out their kids in faux scary and help them carve
faces into pumpkins. Speaking as one with no experience of parenthood, I can
only imagine there is irresistible pressure within children’s peer-groups to
out-Halloween each other. Far be it from me, therefore, to advocate
discouraging the purchase of mountains of disposable tat for their excited
offspring. That way lies tearful tantrums, so I’m told. Rumour also has it that
there is an entire city, somewhere in China, whose raison d’être is to
manufacture this stuff and were its customers to fade away, its economic future
would be dire. But hey, c'est la vie, capitalist-style.
Five
evenings after Halloween, there is another celebration, irrefutably British and
indisputably secular in origin. As such, it is resistant to foreign
interference. Guy Fawkes night still follows the same rituals now as it did
when I was a kid: children blagging money from adults with their “penny for the
Guy” schtick, a box of fireworks for dad to let off in the garden and a bonfire
on which to burn (an effigy of) Guy Fawkes. It’s all good, harmless fun – as
long as you’re careful with the combustibles and don’t take the effigy-burning too
seriously. Apart from fancier, more expensive fireworks, there doesn’t seem to
be much scope for further monetisation of the tradition. Could that be the
reason for its enduring sameness? Mind you, there is simmering controversy as
to the title. If this night belongs to Mr. Fawkes, surely there should be an
apostrophe in the spelling?
