Death, where is thy sting in this zombie festival?

We have taken on the tackier US Halloween customs, while ignoring our cultural heritage

CALL ME curmudgeonly, because I am. I really don’t like our recently acquired way of celebrating Halloween. There were queues around the block for shops selling costumes and masks a week ago, and houses have sprouted plastic pumpkins like some kind of orange fungus.

It’s not that I’m averse to a bit of the old dressing-up, you understand. Who was flouncing around at our school’s charity fundraising event, pretending to be Adele, fluttering false eyelashes like windscreen wipers, gamely ignoring that Ms Laurie Blue Adkins is about 100 times more talented, and half my age? I was.

Little people solemnly dressing up as everything from ghouls to Jedward is fine, too. I always accompany my own kids and nieces and nephews around the place, pretending to disapprove as they get steadily higher on sucrose, but secretly enjoying every minute.

My problem is not that the way Halloween is currently celebrated is just so American. For some in the US, it would be deeply un-American. I lived in Texas during the late 1980s, and the people in the church I attended there would have started shaking holy water over you in horror if you attempted to celebrate the godless festival of Halloween.

Their children celebrated All Saints’ Day, instead, by dressing up as various saints. The creative boy who attempted a compromise with popular culture by dressing up as St Stephen after he had been stoned to death got into a lot of trouble.

His costume of a white sheet festooned with gore might have been historically accurate, but it did not impress his mother.

I have to say that some of the miniature Texan saints seemed to be casting envious eyes at their secular neighbours, but that might be just me. At least the young Catholics had All Saints’ Day, but the evangelicals just shunned the whole event as potentially demonic, and way too much like a dance with the dark side.

If you saw some of the get-ups that normally conservative Texan moms appeared in at Halloween, you might concede that they had a point.

There was also a bizarre competitiveness, so that the Halloween illuminations rivalled those of Christmas, but just with a darker tinge.

Giant warlock heads with glowing red eyes were only for amateurs, when the whole house and yard could be done up like a set from a Hammer horror movie by the truly dedicated.

Naturally enough, it’s not the saints and scholars aspect of American Halloween celebrations that we decided to emulate here. The commercially available costumes for grown women range from tart to tartier, and the average mental age of the male of the species seems to be summed up by the fact that two of the most popular costumes seem to be Mario from Super Mario Bros, and any member of the Village People.

What makes it all a tad frustrating is that we have decided to absorb the tackier aspects of American Halloween celebrations, while blithely obliterating any aspect of our own cultural heritage.

Take trick or treating. I hate that term. When I was a kid, we called it going out on the pooka, an anglicised version of púca. Depending on which part of the country you were from, the púca could be more benevolent than malevolent, but was capricious and whimsical nonetheless.

Some people believed that you should never eat an over-ripe blackberry, because the púca spat on them. My father explained more prosaically that an over-ripe berry was very likely to contain maggots.

We were told as kids that Samhain was when the borders between the spirit world and our world became more porous, and spirits could wander into our world. Dressing up was a way to confuse them.

So much more poetic and scary than miserable old trick or treating, with its urban myths of American psychos giving kids apples with razor blades in them, or poisoned candy. Candy. I hate that word, too. What’s wrong with sweets?

Now, the ubiquitous pumpkin. I have to concede on that one. The Irish custom was to carve turnips, which are horribly hard to scoop out and carve. I remember my Dad patiently whittling away, and it took ages.

So it demonstrated good sense when our starving ancestors fled to the new world and discovered these handy-dandy pumpkins, so much more amenable to carving.

Having the custom return to its native land in altered form is understandable given the recalcitrant nature of turnips. But did it have to spawn a plague of plastic pumpkins on every available surface? Come to think of it, my Dallas churchgoing friends were not alone in their worries about the pagan nature of Halloween.

Pope Gregory III in the seventh century moved the feast of Christian martyrs from May to November, and expanded it to include all Christian saints. (Bet he never foresaw what my young Texan friend would do to St Stephen, the first Christian martyr.)

By also making November 2nd the feast of all souls, the awareness of the dead was Christianised, but not eradicated. The irony of it is that our current celebrations of Halloween attempt to erase the looming knowledge of death, or any form of unpleasantness, unless it’s safely domesticated as a toothless zombie.

So I guess our Halloween is not that American after all – just another reason to drown our sorrows.