How Halloween turned into a monster

Published on Monday 30 October 2006 00:14

GIE'S oor Halloween ... The traditional cry of the guiser grows ever fainter, driven into the outer darkness of what was once All Hallow's Eve by strident shrieks of "trick or treat". The once-ubiquitous reek of burnt neep is dissipated under the glare of the pumpkin, that transatlantic yellow peril which has all but usurped our native turnip as lord of Halloween misrule.

While police forces across the country issue warnings about excessive trick-or-treating, the gibbering of ghaisties and ghoulies enjoying their annual spree is drowned out by the ringing tills of what has become a multi-million-pound industry.

After Christmas and Easter, according to research analysts, Halloween is the third-most profitable event for retailers in Britain, with associated spending rocketing from 12 million five years ago to an anticipated 120 million this year - reflecting, among other things, the move from home-made guising costumes to often ready-made, bought outfits.

And this is not just for children: the adult fancy dress and decoration sector is the fastest-growing aspect of Halloween spending - while the UK pumpkin market is worth some 25 million.

Pumpkins, of course, as even the most fervent Halloween fundamentalist has to agree, are easier to carve than turnips (many of us will recall maternal wrath as the best kitchen knife was mangled, and spoil heaps of surplus neep accumulated). The leering orange vegetable's popularity may also have been boosted among adults by reports that its seeds may improve the sex drive.

Perhaps the cry should be "Gie's back oor Halloween", as the one-time pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, hijacked by Christianity as All Hallow's Eve, is reduced to a consumer-driven charade, like Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. Perversely, it has come full circle, the holiday having been first imported to America with Scots and Irish emigrants, then returned, rehashed and hugely commercialised, to Britain and Europe over the past century.

But this is not necessarily something we should worry too much about, according to Professor Hugh O'Donnell of Glasgow Caledonian University's cultural business group. It regards the festival as having become such a phenomenon it is holding an international Halloween conference tomorrow and Wednesday.

"I don't actually think the traditional Scottish Halloween has gone away," he says. "My own experience in our street in Motherwell, the kids still come round, still guising as I remember it.

"And usually they still expect to sing something, tell a joke. In America and Canada, the kids don't do anything any more. I think we'll get a mixture of both; the traditional guising, but you'll see pumpkins in people's windows."

Prof O'Donnell and his colleagues are engaged with all aspects of the ancient festival, from the cultural to the religious to the commercial - conference papers cover issues as varied as the festival's folklore; its significance to New Age Wiccans; supernatural tourism in Scotland and Transylvania, and the intriguing-sounding Dracula Was A Woman and Media Representations Of Halloween In A Post-Socialist Country.

Prof O'Donnell points to the way Halloween has grown in England and Europe where a few decades ago it was virtually unknown, partly due, he suggests, to the popular impact of John Carpenter's Halloween horror film and its sequels.

"It only really started to appear in continental Europe from about the Nineties. In the Catholic countries, they would have celebrated All Hallows. Then Halloween arrived, not from Scotland or Ireland, where it was born, but from America, where we took it in the 19th century. It came to Europe with these big Halloween movies, rather than in any Celtic form."

For story-teller and children's theatre director Allison Galbraith, who has been doing Halloween workshops with school children as part of the current Scottish Storytelling Festival, the traditional elements of Halloween are still about, "although usually only if there's someone older around, a granny or a mum or a schoolteacher, who insists that they learn their party piece, rather than just 'trick or treat'".

"Having been in shops seeing about costumes, I'm blown away by how commercial it's become," adds Galbraith, who grew up in a Scottish household in the West Midlands where the late-autumn festival was unheard of - "we held the first Halloween party for my school pals".

"We've been busy carving pumpkins," she confesses. "But we're using a turnip for the show as well. My partner was given the job of carving it and has been muttering about it being so much harder."

And she suggests, interestingly, that the "trick or treat" concept may not be as alien as we like to protest, referring to the late F Marian McNeil's Silver Bough, which describes the seasonal japes played in crofting communities, which involved everything from blowing smoke into unsuspecting cottages to much turnip-hurling.

Currently visiting Newfoundland, where she spent several years of her life, the Scots Gaelic folklorist and singer Margaret Bennett notes the huge growth in the Halloween industry there, with houses and gardens bedecked with ghosts, bats and pumpkins: "Wherever you turn, it seems no effort is spared to out-Christmas Christmas. And of course there's the sell, sell, sell - candies, costumes and masks - at any price you're crazy enough to pay."

When she returned to Scotland from Canada in the 1970s, Bennett was reassured to find Halloween still being celebrated, but she soon found the pumpkins following her across the Atlantic. She regrets these changes "enormously - and not because folk have changed the way of celebrating; change is part of the whole cycle of tradition. It's how they've changed. The material aspects and commercial pressures are merely a reflection of the changes in Scottish culture in general, with a headlong rush to embrace every aspect of America that can possibly be absorbed into, or superimposed on, our way of life and customs.

"But, perhaps most damaging of all, it denies children the opportunity of being as creative as their forebears. There was fun and freedom in making costumes and even masks out of just about anything. What we now have is a society where people expect everything to have a bar-coded price tag, and a tension between parents and children, all so brainwashed and pressured by the whole business."

Bennett points to the festival's origins in the Celtic New Year: "If we feel the need to celebrate any time, Scots especially, it is this time. If we could shove commercialism aside, I think there is a place for the recognition and celebration of the cycle of life mirrored in the cycle of the year and the seasons and special days, including Halloween."

So perhaps strike a blow for tradition and turnip farmers - celebrate a traditional Halloween tomorrow night. Although perhaps avoid the precincts of Glasgow Caledonian University, which is liable to be haunted by guising academics attending the conference's Halloween dinner.

Britons knock up a bill of 120 million

BRITONS are set to splash out a record 120 million on Halloween celebrations - up from just 12 million five years ago - as the annual night of ghoulishness has become a winner for high-street shops and supermarket giants.

Halloween has become the third most profitable event for Britain's retailers, after Christmas and Easter, beating Guy Fawkes Night and even Valentine's Day in the spending stakes.

Market-research analysts say Britain is catching up with the United States, where the average family spends 65 on decorations, sweets and costumes, and the industry is worth 4.7 billion nationwide.

Last year in the US, BIGresearch conducted a survey of 8,100 adults for the National Retail Federation and found that 53.3 per cent of consumers planned to buy a costume for Halloween 2005, spending 20 on average (up 5 on the previous year).

In 2000, Woolworths launched a Halloween range across the UK comprising 50 festive items. A year later it had expanded the range to 100 and this year there are 237 items on sale.

Tesco - which sent a team of Halloween researchers to the US for six months - anticipates a 33 per cent increase in sales compared to 2005: from 14 million last year to 20 million. Asda, too, has increased its Halloween product line by 10 per cent, anticipating growing demand.

ANNA SMYTH

Children's fancy-dress outfits, masks and "trick or treat" gifts account for less than 20 per cent of the spending spree, with adult Halloween costumes and decorations the fastest-growing category.

Edinburgh ranks number eight on Asda's chart for UK Halloween sales, closely followed by Govan at number nine. The number-one town for Halloween shopping is Havant in Hampshire.

In 2004, Britons bought one million pumpkins purely for the Halloween festival, and an estimated 86 per cent of families decorated their homes accordingly.

A pumpkin in Tesco costs 78 pence, whereas a large pumpkin from Waitrose - grown specifically for lantern-making - will set you back 3.89. The surprise hit of this year, credited with boosting sales at the upmarket supermarket, has been 1.99 Chocolate Eyeballs.

The best-selling Halloween treat in the UK is the Lindt Ghost Bag - containing dark chocolates with white centres - at 3.49.