Suzanne Harrington: Halloween — the world can't get enough of our cultural invention

‘Ghost turnip’, by Eileen Barnes - a nod to Ireland's Halloween traditions. Pic: National Museum of Ireland

I would personally like to thank Ireland for inventing Halloween. 

Thank you, Ireland, for creating the most fun day and night of the year; unlike St Patrick’s Day, it requires no green velour hats or getting drunk in faux Irish pubs in Perth or Toronto or Basildon while pretending to like Guinness.

Unlike Christmas, there is no extended, regimented rigmarole that starts before Halloween itself, or the formulaic psychodrama of wallet-melting weddings. 

No. Halloween is perfect — short, fun, non-prescriptive, and catering to that one aspect strangled by the performative perfectionism of Christmas and weddings — campy weirdness and anti-beauty. 

Heidi Klum in that horrifying worm costume last year. Peak Halloween.

They still don’t quite get it in Britain, though. They think it’s American. No, I patiently womansplain to English friends, it’s Celtic. 

It went with the Irish to the US when we were all emigrating because of you lot occupying us, and then it came back to Britain when Walmart bought Asda and started importing container loads of orange and black plastic crap and cut-price kids’ Halloween costumes, and lo, Halloween became a thing in the supermarket seasonal aisle. 

Now you’re all at it, even the posh shops. Can’t get enough of our cultural invention. You’re welcome.

But what about the pumpkins?, demand the English friends who are still paying attention. 

Are pumpkins Irish then? No, I reply. They’re American. 

We had turnips. Cue guffaws and ridicule, followed by a technical discussion on the not-inconsiderable practical difficulties of carving turnips and their significant aesthetic inferiority to the glorious giant orange pumpkin.

I concur — turnips are rubbish. In the back of my car is an entire patch of Cinderella-carriage-sized pumpkins; I have been watching YouTube videos on how to give them hideous tooth implants, using knives, sharply carved bits of raw potato, and cocktail sticks. Deranged eyeballs. 

So much more fun than the wholesome bore of Christmas tree angels and fairies.

Britain is still only getting the hang of Halloween, despite its growth from a niche thing in Kilburn in the 1980s to something every school kid in the land now associates with not just taking, but actively asking, strangers for sweets — which means the British have never heard of the barm brack. 

This is harder to explain than the turnip.

So, the English friends repeat in horror, as a child you were given a brown fruit cake that had a toothpick, a piece of cloth, a dried pea, a dried bean, and a plastic gold ring baked into it? Did nobody ever choke? 

Not at all, I lie — but they’re not having it. And these things symbolised — their eyes are widening now — domestic violence, domestic drudgery, poverty — unless you got the bean or the ring, which meant money and marriage?

I nod. Everyone wanted the ring and the bean, I add, to avoid the life of violent poverty-stricken drudgery. But I can see by their faces they’re not convinced.

Whatevs. I’m off to do dental work on my pumpkins.

Happy Samhain.