Season’s Gratings – Frank McNally on American Halloween

Visiting America at Halloween, it’s hard to know whether to feel pride at the triumph of an ancient Irish festival or outrage at the wholesale appropriation of a cornerstone of our culture.

The event is huge here: bigger than Christmas, arguably. Or if not bigger then, thanks to its secular character, more universally popular. For many locals, it’s their favourite holiday.

In a country not given to mass funeral attending, wakes, or the other celebrations of death for which Ireland is noted, the exaggerated ghoulishness of Halloween seems to fill a deep need.

Even in the leafier American suburbs, it is currently fashionable to have skeletons in your window, or what looks like a half-buried body in the front garden.

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The blandest of boroughs crawl with witches, vampires, zombies, and every variation of the undead. Their garishness is lessened only by the décor’s cheerful commercialism, with its corporate colours of orange and black.

This is happening in Ireland too, of course, if not to the same extent yet, some people still being reluctant to buy what they thought was theirs already. Little did we realise, back when it was a quaintly ethnic affair, shared only with the Scots, that in Halloween we had a product ripe for globalisation.

Instead, as is the fate of developing economies, we exported the cheap raw materials. Then the Americans processed them, added sugar, and sold the new improved result back to us at a mark-up.

Nothing sums up our historic failure to maximise the event’s potential like the turnip. Our poor ancestors had the inspired idea of carving it into monstrous head shapes, although it was a rare turnip that matched the size of a human cranium.

In the pumpkin, meanwhile, the Americans had a readymade advantage. And after decades of squash proliferation, their lead has only widened.

With the invention in the 1970s of the now dominant “Howden” variety – barely edible but bigger, more orange, and ideally suited to sculpture – they secured global leadership. Not even an Irish skeleton would be seen dead with a turnip these days.

For all its grisliness, the American festival is an anodyne version of the original. As traditionalists know, the essence of Irish Halloween is, or used to be, small-scale vandalism. The only commercial possibilities of the event were the crude insurance policies sold to householders to pre-empt damage – trick-or-treating, if you insist.

But it turns out that we exported the vandalism too, once. And for a time, the US also did that on a bigger scale than the original. It had crossed the Atlantic as mere mischief-making. Then it took on a life of its own in American cities, increasingly involving arson, until in the 20th century, many places considered banning Halloween altogether.

Wisely, most realised that wouldn’t work. Instead, they co-opted it, with communities and even the police putting on organised parties to distract potential trouble-makers. These were so popular that, in order not to miss anything, the vandals took to performing their vandalism the night before, October 30th.

The Eve of the Eve of All Hallows thus became “Devil’s Night”. Which, for some reason, was especially big in and around Detroit, where the annual pyromania was part of that city’s general decline in the 1970s and 80s. At its peak in October 1984, there were 800 fires.

You may remember that in the film Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), set in a Detroit suburb, Minnie Driver’s character is living with her father because her apartment was burned down on Devil’s Night. Meanwhile, that great chronicler of Motor City life, Eminem, wrote a song about the phenomenon, channelling the Devil in the chorus:

“It’s Devil’s Night, it’s Devil’s Night, it’s Devil’s Night/Cause I come back to rule this time (it’s Devil’s Night)/Cause I come back to take what’s mine (It’s Devil’s Night).”

Anyway, eventually, Detroit and other affected cities decided enough was enough. With community policing, they brought the annual arson festival to a gradual end, rebranding October 30th as “Angel’s Night”.

Hence now the paradoxical wholesomeness of American Halloween, in which replicating the visual effects of axe murder in your front garden seems as unthreatening as apple pie. But speaking of pie, there are occasional signs of pumpkin overload here, and not just in waistlines.

When not carving the giant squashes, locals still consume large quantities of the edible varieties, in soups, salads, pies, and many other recipes. To sweeten the vegetable, they use cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg: the sorts of thing that Irish people associate with Christmas but that is here called “pumpkin spice”.

Such is this substance’s ubiquity in October that not even coffee is safe. But as happened with the vandalism, some communities are drawing a line. It’s not unusual now to see notices in café windows declaring the premises a “pumpkin spice free zone.” So who knows? Maybe the Halloween turnip will make a comeback yet.