Frankenpost

The lowing herds of the annual pumpkin migration

I was thinking I'd better grab this opportunity to write a Hallowe'en post before it crumbles into dust like a vampire in the sun – writing a blog can sometimes feel like battling with the undead – but then I thought I ought first to exhume my efforts from previous years, just to be sure I wasn't needlessly reviving dead posts. So, for example, ten years ago, I wrote:

Much as I resent the imposition of Halloween (or "Hallo, Ian! Trickle treat!" as one of our neighbour's kids used to have it), I have no desire to be known as the grumpy old man who lectures kids on the doorstep about cultural imperialism. No siree, Bob!

So, today is the day to get out the ceremonial trickle-treat pot, which spends most of the year leering out of the Red Cupboard. Actually, it is known in our family as the Skanky Sweets Pot, as it has traditionally been our way of disposing of all the disgusting sweets our own kids had, wisely, decided not to eat that year.

Not much has changed in the ensuing decade, other than the departure of our own sweet-eaters from the premises, and the further escalation of the cash-bonanza that the end of October now represents for the supermarkets, selling everything from "pumpkins for a pound" to mini living-dead costumes for five-year-olds (with actual dangly eyeball; aww, bless!). TBH, I don't think I'd ever so much as seen a pumpkin in real life before about the year 2000, but now they're "traditional", innit, and stacked high in the entrance lobby of our local M&S Foodhall. Clearly, compared to a couple of boxes of cheap fireworks [1] for Bonfire Night, this is a little Christmas-come-early for the shops, and it's the shops who determine our beliefs and lifestyles, these days, like our robber-baron overlords of old. So we're all Goths now, apparently, at least for one day.

We have had a pleasant two-year respite from those early evening knocks on the door – one of the few up-sides of COVID and lockdown – but this year, despite the wind and rain, Hallowe'en was back, like the umpteenth sequel to some tacky horror-movie franchise. I have to say, either they're bussing them in from somewhere, or there are a lot more small kids living in the area than there used to be. I missed the posse of witchy teenage girls that used to rock up most years around 9 o'clock, but I suppose it's not unlikely that these tiny kids in their zombie makeup are theirs... After all, I do remember being taken for a grandparent, in my mid-forties, when waiting to collect our two in the school playground. Anyway, and mysteriously, the Skanky Sweets Pot was still sufficiently full of mouldering chews, jelly babies, and flumps to see them all off happily. "See them off" as in depart from our front door, not ... You know what I mean. Nothing can be proved.

Looking through those old Hallowe'en posts, I then discovered that just three years ago I had written most of what now follows, realised that I had nothing much to add to it and, worse, that it seemed unlikely that anything I could come up with today would be an improvement on it. It's possible I'm running out of things to say, or even running on empty, brain-wise, like a [oh, do stop the ghouly-ghosty similes. Ed.]. So, like the BBC – my mission also being to "inform, educate, and entertain" – I find myself resorting to repeats, owing to lack of resources. Is it possible this is becoming a zombie blog? [I said stop it! Ed.] Anyway, here we go again, with a partially revenant Frankenpost:

It would be pretty much impossible to ignore the fact that Monday was Hallowe'en. You can hide in the kitchen with all the lights off, but out there on the street godless young fools are flirting with powerful forces they wot not of, in pursuit of ... Well, cheap sweets, mainly. What a price to set on your immortal soul! As I have complained before, this orange, sugar-tacky American import has now largely supplanted our thoroughly wholesome native celebration of certain 17th-century, anti-Catholic, pro-royalist hangings, drawings, and quarterings, as well as an unspecific, but all-encompassing joy in public burnings at the stake in days gone by. Ah, the world we have lost!

Most people these days think of Hallowe'en as a one-night-only license to dress up and/or score sweets off their more gullible neighbours. We're not completely against this sugar-led corruption of our youth, much as we'd rather they were collecting firewood to burn some guy called "Forks" in effigy in a few days' time. I have already mentioned our household's venerable Skanky Sweets Pot, annually-resurrected from its crypt in the Red Cupboard, which is full of alarmingly out-of-date, but durable items like Haribos and jelly babies (but which, I have to admit, are starting to look a bit too zombified to avoid potential future legal action). However, it is less widely known that Hallowe'en (or All Hallows' Eve) is actually just the first of a three-day binge of Christian observances known, in British tradition, as Allhallowtide.

So we know all about Day One, All Hallows' Eve, or at least we think we do, which is, to the contemporary mind, much the same thing. But Day Two, November 1st, is All Saints' Day (no, idiot, not them), on which occasion we, which is to say "they", honour all the saints and martyrs, known and unknown. I really like the idea of the unknown saints, the ones who just got on with being saintly, and didn't go on about it all that much. If you must have saints, those are probably the best sort to have. Then comes Day Three, All Souls' Day, on which the faithful dead are honoured, especially friends and family. In Mexico November 2nd is, of course, a Big Thing: El Día de los Muertos. But it seems that in many other Catholic countries the two latter days tend to get rolled into one big November 1st "let's all remember the dead" holiday; something that is quite therapeutic, I imagine, but with which we've completely lost touch in the chilly Protestant north. I don't suppose many young Hallowe'en celebrants give much thought to dear old granny, the day after they've pestered the neighbours and begun the ruin of their teeth. Besides, in the past we were all too busy in early November gathering combustibles into a tottering heap to burn Catholics, if only by proxy, to take off the chill.

I'm not sure if or when the unfaithful, pagan, agnostic, atheistic, or even the grateful dead get honoured, but there must be an awful lot more of them out there by now, wherever they are. Maybe a democratic movement of the dead will eventually emerge, assert the rights of the faithless, and finally get this diary-issue sorted out? Let All Souls be for all souls! They've got all the time in the world to sort it out, after all, even if we haven't. Not yet, anyway. So, in my customary fashion, I set aside a few moments on Wednesday evening to remember some of my own dear, departed elective family: happy heathens and earnest atheists, all of them, to the very end. So may I propose the traditional toast: To absent friends!

Ah, make we the most of what we may yet spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!
FitzGerald version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Quatrain 23

 

1. Actually, fireworks have become amazingly expensive. In the heyday of Bonfire Night, back in the 1950s and 60s, boxes of assorted fireworks used to appear towards November in closed glass cabinets in most newsagents and sweet shops, but rarely if ever anywhere else, and vanish immediately after the 5th. Now there are year-round specialist firework shops, selling elaborate, high-explosive items that would probably come in handy in Ukraine, such as the £375 box "monster of fireworks. Consists of four cakes, 1 x 58 shot and 3 x 50 shot cakes retrospective". I assume "cake" here is a pyrotechnic term, and not some tactical baked item.