We’ve lost some of the meaning of our ancient Halloween tradition

I CELEBRATE the feast of Samhain with religious fervour. I guess I need it. Every year when the black shroud of winter falls over us in the afternoon, I feel it like a body blow, writes Victoria White.

Call it Seasonal Affective Disorder. Call it winter. The least I can do is observe a ritual for letting go of the light and facing into the darkness.

It’s no wonder we Irish gave the world Halloween. We live very far north but thanks to the gulf stream we rarely benefit from reflected light on snow. For thousands of years, our ancestors have marked Samhain from sundown on October 31 until sundown on November 1 as the dying of the light before the winter. The Mound of the Hostages, a Neolithic passage tomb at the Hill of Tara is aligned with the Samhain sunrise.

Samhain is an important marker in the agricultural calendar for herdsmen. It was when you brought your animals onto lower ground and it was when you slaughtered what you needed for the winter. Just last Sunday at the “Winterage” festival I followed the cattle up Mullaghmore in Co Clare in the ritual of “reverse transhumance” which takes place on the Burren because of the heat which is held in the limestone in winter.

The minute you follow cattle through a field you know this is something your people have done for centuries. And after the herding and the slaughter came the feasting. It was at this auspicious time that Queen Maeve’s Cattle Raid of Cooley took place, when the men of Ulster least expected it.

But there’s far more to Samhain than herding. This was the time when the gates between our world and the world of the dead were open. They exited from frightening places like Oweynagat or “The Cave of the Cats” in Roscommon. My mother’s house in rural Donegal was beside a fairy fort which must have been a lively place at this time of year.

When the dead exited, they walked among us and could be mistaken for us. That’s why we dress up to look like them as ghouls and witches. That way maybe they’ll think we’re dead already and maybe they won’t take us with them. The custom of going from house to house asking for food to buy off the spirits of the other world goes back into the mists of time.

The Halloween I remember as a child was full of this mystery. For a start, it was really dark. And we were really scared. We went around the neighbourhood in a gang of kids and we knocked on the doors of creepy houses, some of them occupied by angry old people who were probably, God help them, mentally ill.

We didn’t recognise the other kids from the area when we met them in their ghost sheets and their witches’ masks and they didn’t recognise us. It was a night of transformations and one Halloween night when I was about nine I used it to transform. I dressed up in a white dress and went up the road to a huge bonfire in the garden of a house I had never visited before. There were boys. That was it. I never played with any of my old friends again. It was like some sort of pagan growing up ritual.

There were the apples and the nuts, of course, the fruits of the season and maybe the odd five pence piece. And there were the games, including games of “divination” which have their origins in the idea of Samhain as a time when the future is known. Though I had a plastic barm brack ring for every finger before I had so much of a sniff of a wedding and all those coins I nearly swallowed from the colcannon didn’t bring me wealth.

Effortlessly, in Dublin in the 1970s, I took part in Halloween traditions with their roots in traditions which were thousands of years old. True, many of us had parents from farms in the country but native Dubliners were as steeped in the traditions as we were. What has happened? We have taken death out of Halloween. The kids who come to my door on Saturday night dressed in the costumes Mammy bought them will shake a bag in my face while Daddy looks on smiling with half a plastic dagger stuck on either side of his head.

The kids snarl if they get apples and nuts, so the reference to the season is entirely lost. Only the very little ones are even slightly frightened. There’s no sense they’re dressing up to trick the souls of the dead who might be out to get them. The pumpkins haven’t been carefully carved and lit to warn off visitors from the Other World like the turnip Jack o’ Lanterns of old.

I hesitate to blame America for the change in Halloween. We’ve made the change ourselves by borrowing back the American Halloween traditions which deny death. Denial of death — of decay and of age — is one of the central planks of American culture. It feeds the market economy because it denies the perspective which our inevitable death brings.

I love the America and its “Yes we can” attitude but the truth is that a lot of the time we can’t. We can’t live forever. Neither can our loved ones. These are crushing realities with which we still have to live. But our culture is deleting death from its rituals.

More and more I ignore Halloween but on November 1 I will be sitting religiously watching the light die with some friends. We will sing some songs and share our sadness at the loss of people we loved. In countries right across the world a Day of the Dead is celebrated: it is Mexico’s most important festival while in Italy remnants of the Roman veneration of ancestors remain as places are set for the departed. They leave the children green beans and confetti.

I WILL never forget a journey by bus through rural Poland back in the early 1990s. The countryside was completely dark except for the fields of light made by candles placed on the graves of loved ones in every cemetery. By a lovely tradition, candles were also placed on the graves of those who were not remembered by anyone. There were candles in glass jars for sale everywhere and I bought one and clutched it as I had a good cry for my poor father, then dead more than a decade. And then I felt better.

I wonder what we’re hiding behind all those plastic Halloween masks. I think it’s death. The churches still make space for death but the wider culture in Ireland is following the western mainstream in pretending it doesn’t exist.

That doesn’t help the bereaved any which is all of us who have ever loved and lost. And all of us who love will lose, as surely as the sunlight disappears over the rim of the earth.

I hesitate to blame America for the change in Halloween but we’ve borrowed its traditions which deny death