Happy Post-Halloween and I hope, for those of you living in a place that still observes this, the time change didn’t disturb your routines too much.
This weekend, we went out this past weekend with the usual crew (minus the dog, who would probably like to have participated in the festivities) - costumes, candy, the whole thing. Here’s what we looked like.
Every year I tell myself I’ll plan the costumes further in advance and every year it doesn’t work. One, because Hallowe’en costumes don’t really come out until mid-late September and two, my daughter changes her mind about six times before she makes her final decision. It always ends up working out fine so I don't know why I haven’t accepted this yet.
Since a lot of what I write about in these emails is tracing everyday things back to where they actually came from, I thought I’d look into some of the Hallowe’en traditions.
Before the candy
Long before kids walked around trick-or-treating for candy, the less-fortunate people in parts of England went “souling” around Allhallowtide. Starting around the 15th century, they’d visit better-off neighbours, receive small soul cakes or charity, and in return, they promised prayers for the household’s dead. Here’s what the soul cakes looked like:
These cakes were usually made with various spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, along with raisins or currants. The cross on top signified that they were an act of charity - of giving food to those living in poverty. The prayers that were offered in exchange for these soul cakes were meant to help the dead move through purgatory.
The original jack-o’-lantern
Pumpkins were not always the face of Halloween. In parts of Ireland and Scotland, people hollowed out turnips - because that’s what grew locally - carved faces into them, and put candles inside. They were used to frighten neighbours on the night of October 31st.
The name comes from a folktale about a man called Jack who was refused entry to both Heaven and Hell and left to wander in the dark with nothing but a lantern. There are dozens of versions of the story depending on the region, but the lantern part stuck.
The National Museum of Ireland holds a Donegal turnip lantern recorded in 1943 as the kind made locally around 1900. If you’ve never seen one, look it up. They are unsettling in a way that a pumpkin on a suburban porch has never been. The faces are uneven, the features are crude, and the light comes through in a way that looks less decorative and more like something you’d cross the road to avoid.
The pumpkin version is the North American adaptation - Irish immigrants carried the custom across the Atlantic, and the crop that was available here happened to be easier to carve and a probably a lot less frightening.
Chicken Feed
Candy corn might be the most divisive Halloween candy (I realize that saying this won’t stop anyone from having a strong opinion about it either way). But it wasn’t originally a Halloween candy at all.
Around the turn of the 20th century, American candy makers were producing novelty sweets shaped like farm products - chestnuts, turnips, clover leaves, corn. The corn version stood out because of its three hand-layered colours, which was a technical novelty at the time before machines could do it. Goelitz, now Jelly Belly, sold some of their candy corn as “Chicken Feed,” with rooster-and-farm imagery on the packaging. It was penny candy, sold year-round and marketed to a country that was still largely agrarian.
The Halloween connection came later. The orange, yellow, and white happened to suit autumn displays, and by the 1950s, when trick-or-treating became increasingly candy-centred, October marketing gave an ordinary year-round sweet a seasonal identity.
On Saturday
After we walked the neighbourhood, my daughter did what she does every year - sorted her haul on the living room floor by type, by preference, by what she’d eat first and what she’d trade (which is our way of removing some of the candy from the stash; she gets to pick a toy or an activity she’s been wanting to do). None of the above traditions mean that much to her, she just sees them as part of the activities that come along with a fun night of dressing up and getting candy.
I like knowing where things started, even the ones I’m not trying to change. Souling was about the dead. Turnip lanterns were meant to actually scare people. Candy corn was farm candy that found its season. None of that will probably change how we’ll do Halloween next year, but I’ll probably think about the turnip (warning, it’s not cute).
See what’s there. Choose what stays.