The Hallowed Eve

Dimensions of Culture in a Calendar Festival in Northern Ireland

Jack Santino

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813192451, 9780813120812
• eBook ISBN: 9780813184586
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In Northern Ireland, Halloween is such a major celebration that it is often called the Irish Christmas. A day of family reunions, meals, and fun, Halloween brings people of all ages together with rhyming, storytelling, family fireworks, and community bonfires. Perhaps most important, it has become a day that transcends the social conflict found in this often troubled nation.

Through the extensive use of interviews, The Hallowed Eve offers a fascinating look at the various customs, both past and present, that mark the celebration of the holiday. Looking through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation, Jack Santino examines how the traditions exist in a nonthreatening, celebratory way to provide a model of how life could be in Northern Ireland. Halloween, concludes Santino, is a marriage of death and life, a joining of cultural opposites: indoor and outdoor, domesticity and wildness, male and female, old and young.

Although current folk and popular traditions can be divisive, Halloween in Northern Ireland is universally considered to belong to everyone, regardless of their background or political leanings. The holiday is a dramatic example of how a community comes together one day a year, and these Northern Irish traditions capture the fundamental and everyday dimensions of life in Ulster.

I

The Irish Christmas

I should say at the outset that this feast was held on the night of the 31st October, and that it was reckoned as one of the principal feasts of the year. In fact I think that the old folk seemed to think, and regarded it as the greatest festival of the year with the exception perhaps of Christmas. They, so to speak, regarded it as in a category by itself.

—Donegal, 1943, University College of Dublin’s Folklore Archives (UCD)

People I interviewed about Halloween invariably told me that it was a great family day, and they frequently likened it to Christmas. In fact, R.H. Buchanan calls Halloween “the Irish Christmas” in his pair of influential articles on Irish calendar customs (1962, 1963). To me, however, Christmas, with its divine child and cheerful lights, has a very different feel to it than Halloween, with its deathly images of ghosts, skeletons, and skulls. This is because I am American. Halloween in the United States, with its trick-or-treating and pranks outside at night, logically has nocturnal creatures such as cats, bats, and owls associated with it. Youngsters take great liberties, targeting and tormenting adults with tricks or, at the very least, approaching them and demanding treats. It is a festival that emphasizes inversion. In the United States, Halloween tends to be peer group oriented. While various age groups are involved, and parents do many things with their children (make costumes, carve jack-o’-lanterns, go trick-or-treating), the emphasis is on being outside with friends of one’s own age, going from house to house together, playing pranks and making mischief. Young people are out of the home and allowed to break the ordinary rules of everyday social life, within reason. Domesticity and social order are abandoned temporarily.

Christmas, on the other hand, is a time for family gatherings, a big dinner, and the exchange of gifts. Peace on earth and goodwill toward all are the overtly expressed values. It is a sacred time for many. It takes place indoors around the hearth: Santa Claus comes down the chimney, and ideally this is where the stockings are hung. One’s relationships with extended family, friends, and associates are reinforced with gifts and cards. It is a festival that intensifies an idealized social structure.

American Halloween is threatening: stories abound of poisoned candy or razor blades hidden inside apples. Some groups denounce the day as a satanic celebration, while heavy metal rock bands seize on Halloween for its imagery. In Detroit, the night before Halloween is called Devils Night, when the license of Halloween goes far beyond any reasonable limits. People light fires that burn entire city blocks to the ground. In this case, the liminality of Halloween, which allows for pranks and breaking rules, joins with the symbolism of devils and the fire of Hell to create an urban nightmare.

Further, the tendency in the United States is toward control of the inversive and subversive elements of Halloween. Towns regulate the times and even the day of trick-or-treating; one Ohio town in 1993 declared Saturday, October 23, 1-3 P.M., as the official hours for the children’s ritual begging—more than one whole week in advance of Halloween and in daylight. In part, this was done to distance the children’s trick-or-treat custom from the presumed satanic and dangerous elements of Halloween. In Northern Ireland, the parallel activity of Halloween rhyming takes place for several weeks before October 31, but in the United States, trick-or-treating on a day other than Halloween is highly unusual.

Another recent development in American Halloween is the attention paid to the nature of disguises worn. In a well-meaning attempt to increase sensitivity toward marginalized groups in American society, children in some regions are instructed not to dress as witches or as members of other ethnic groups, such as Gypsies. The use of blackface is forbidden. Such rules attempt to control elements that are central to Halloween as I experienced it as a child in the 1950s: the exhilaration of being out after dark, safely exploring new territories, staying out late, and overstepping the bounds of good taste. The marginalized figure works as a Halloween costume because Halloween is about marginality, transition, anomaly, and pollution (Douglas 1966). It is a time when we do what is otherwise not allowed, when we recognize that which we usually avoid and, in so doing, make central the people who are social outcasts and that which is stigmatized and shunted off to the periphery of society.

The above describes the holiday I knew. However, what I knew was not true for Northern Ireland. Since I knew only the American version of Halloween, I was baffled. It was hard for me to imagine Halloween as a day that celebrated snug and cozy family values, yet this was precisely what I was being told. However, I have always felt Halloween to be the first of a series of holidays that culminate in the Christmas–New Year festival week (see Santino 1994a). In Northern Ireland I experienced not only Halloween but also Harvest Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day. I also attended the December burning of the effigy of Robert Lundy (the seventeenth-century governor of Derry City said to be a traitor to the Williamite cause) and parades of the Orange Order on Easter Monday and Tuesday. I now saw Halloween as part of a complex set of festivals and rituals that guide this society through an intricate maze of cultural values and social issues having to do with family, society, politics, and identity.

The Importance of History

All Ireland is divided into four provinces: Connacht, Leinster, Munster, and Ulster. Ireland is further divided into thirty-two counties. Ulster consists of nine counties, six of which today form the discrete political entity called Northern Ireland. It is necessary to recount, however simplistically, the historical background of the contemporary political situation in Northern Ireland because virtually nothing there is truly untouched by it. Although northeastern Ireland is only twenty-seven miles from the coast of Scotland, and there have been movements of peoples back and forth for millennia, we begin this highly compressed historical narrative with King Dermot MacMurrough, who invited the English into Ireland in 1169 to help him fight against enemy tribes. Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope, granted Henry II possession of Ireland (1154), and within two years the English were firmly established and had a parliament in Dublin. In 1541 Henry VIII proclaimed himself king of Ireland and declared it forever a part of the realm of England. These actions were accompanied by a subjugation of the Irish people, many of whom were displaced from their land. In the seventeenth century, anglicization was heavily promoted in the north, along with the clearing of the land of the native peoples and the plantation of English and Scottish settlers. The suppression of the Irish language and the Catholic religion culminated in the arrival of Oliver Cromwell in 1650, who brutally suppressed Catholic uprisings. In 1688 James II was deposed, because of his Catholic sympathies, and replaced on the English throne by William, Prince of Orange. James fled to Ireland, where he was defeated by William at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. Most Protestants in Northern Ireland today see this battle as an almost mythic event, one that ensured the British throne for the Protestant religion and confirmed the British Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. Ironically, despite the perceptions of the various groups today, William had the pope’s support in these wars.

With the Act of Union in 1800, the Irish parliament was removed and replaced by direct governance from Westminster. Throughout the nineteenth century, many people pushed for the return of home rule, which simply meant the reestablishment of the Irish parliament. This was not independence. Nevertheless, Ulster Protestants, who considered themselves British, opposed the 1913 Home Rule Bill, fearing the loss of Protestant power to the Catholic population. Under these circumstances, the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed to fight the English in order to retain Westminster rule. In the south, the Irish Volunteers were formed to oppose the UVF. This same UVF fought in World War I as the 36th Division and were massacred at the battle of the Somme. They are remembered as heroes today by Ulster Protestants. Some Irish Volunteers also joined the British army, recognizing the greater urgency of the war effort. The hardline Irish Republican Brotherhood gained control of the Irish Volunteers, leading to the 1916 Easter Rebellion centered in the Dublin general post office. The Volunteers were defeated within a week and were generally unpopular with the Irish people until their leaders were killed in prison, an incident that made martyrs of them. Although the uprising failed, it set into motion a series of events that included the Anglo-Irish War in 1919. In 1921 the Government of Ireland Act established the six Ulster counties of Fermanagh, Down, Armagh, Antrim, Tyrone, and Londonderry as Northern Ireland, and Ireland accepted a truce. Ireland became a British dominion with its own government. This treaty sparked the Irish Civil War between those who were prepared to accept the partition and those who were not. By 1923 the antitreaty forces were defeated, but the IRA continued their campaign to reunite the North and the South. The 1921 establishment of the Republic of Ireland as a free state but a dominion of Great Britain was followed in 1949 by the severing of all links. The Republic of Ireland, now known as Eire, claimed jurisdiction over the six counties of Ulster, which had become a Protestant homeland, but had no realistic way of enforcing the claim. The IRA continued its campaign; Protestants responded with a reformed Ulster Volunteer Force in Belfast.

In the late 1960s, Catholics in Northern Ireland formed a civil rights movement modeled on that in the United States. After serious attacks occurred in Catholic communities, British troops arrived in Northern Ireland to protect the Catholics. At first they were cheered, but skirmishes soon began between the British and Catholic activists. The violence spun out of control, leading to atrocities on all sides, the formation of other paramilitary groups, and the removal of the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont. Cease-fires on both sides as of late 1994 have led to a reduction of British troop levels and a sense of hope among the populations of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, the majority of whom do not condone the violence and want peace through a fair and just political settlement of the age-old divisions and problems that have torn the island of Ireland. Agreement as to which political settlement is genuinely fair continues to be a problem.

Today, Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. The Union flag, popularly referred to as the Union Jack, is the flag of the North, and Elizabeth II is recognized as monarch, at least by the Protestants. The Republic, generally referred to as the South, claims the six counties as legitimately its own. The 40 percent Roman Catholic population of Northern Ireland is generally aligned, emotionally if not politically, with the Republic. Those wishing to remain a member of the British Commonwealth are called unionists; those wishing to join the Republic of Ireland are called nationalists. More militant unionists, including those who use violent means, are referred to as loyalists, while militant nationalists are called republicans. All Ireland, then, it can be said, is divided in two: North and South. At certain times and under certain circumstances, the North is divided into loyalist vs. republican, unionist vs. nationalist, and Protestant vs. Catholic. This is the underlying historical basis of the ongoing troubles that continue to plague Northern Ireland.

The six counties of Ulster cover only 5,452 square miles of land—slightly larger than the state of Connecticut—and support a population of only 2.5 million. Yet these six counties have had a far greater impact on the rest of Ireland, the United States, and Great Britain than their size would indicate. Historically, the Ulster Protestants (frequently referred to as Scotch-Irish) were among the principal settlers and shapers of American society. Northern Ireland today boasts that twelve American presidents trace their lineage to Protestant Ulster. There is a growing (if still minority) tendency to espouse Ulster as a unique cultural area through the purported heritage of the Picts, or Cruthins, who predated the Celts in Ireland. According to Ian Adamson (1974), much of what is considered today to be Celtic—design motifs, ironwork, and so forth—was adapted from the Cruthins. Further, some parts of Ireland, particularly the northeast area, were never entirely conquered by the Celts and never Gaelicized. The effect of these ideas is to posit Ulster as always having been separate from Gaelic Ireland as well as Anglo-Saxon Britain. This interpretation of history is used to support political claims of independence today.

There is a historical link between Halloween in the United States and in Ireland. Most scholars accept that many, if not most, American Halloween customs were brought to the United States by the Irish, first by the Ulster Protestants in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then by the great wave of Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine in the 1840s (see, e.g., Kerby Miller 1985). Conversely, as American culture today permeates societies around the world, carried chiefly by the electronic media, Irish Halloween begins to show features of American popular culture. Less so than one might think, however. Even where they share many of the same features, the emphasis and symbolic meanings vary. Because so many Americans are of Ulster Protestant and Irish Catholic descent, and because of the historical connections of American Halloween to the Irish festival, I did not expect the differences to be as many and as varied as they were. Not only are the customs different, but Irish attitudes toward the day and its purpose in the celebratory calendar seem to be almost the inverse of American Halloween.

A comparison of similar customs is instructive. In the United States, one of the major Halloween activities is trick-or-treating. Children wear costumes, sometimes homemade but usually storebought (although some people combine the two, using the manufactured costumes as a base for an imaginative design) and go from house to house with a bag in hand. At each house they ring the doorbell and say, “Trick-or-treat,” to whoever opens it. Very rarely would anyone respond with anything other than a treat, which is most often factory-wrapped candy. Homemade treats are sometimes given, as are apples, but recent scares concerning poisoned treats have all but put an end to this. Storebought, wrapped candy is felt to be safer. The rumor, then, reinforces the commercialization of the holiday. Children go to as many homes as possible to get the largest amount of candy. Trick-or-treating is done on Halloween night itself, or on a weekend night near it. It is done on one night only, and as we have seen, the acceptable hours (6-8 P.M., for instance) are usually established by local officials.

The parallel to trick-or-treating in Northern Ireland is Halloween rhyming. Unlike trick-or-treating, however, rhyming is done for several nights or even weeks before Halloween and not on Halloween night itself. Children do not wear “fancy dress,” or costumes in the American sense. Instead, they may wear a black litter-bin liner (garbage bag) over the body, black or white makeup on the face, and perhaps a witch’s hat and wig. Some children wear a sheet, as a ghost, and some might wear the oversized discarded clothing of their parents. The emphasis is not on replicating a character from popular culture. Frequently children wear masks. One woman told me, “It’s the mask, not the costume, that’s important.” Children do not expect sweets, nor are they given any. Instead, people give apples, nuts, or small amounts of money. The children do not carry bags. The most common Halloween rhyme in Northern Ireland is this:

Halloween is coming and the geese are getting fat.

Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do.

If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you,

And your old man, too!

Some children may start rhyming as early as September. In these cases, adults might refuse to give them anything. My friend Peter Harvey will not give them anything if the standard “geese” rhyme is all they do. He expects them to do more for the money. Maskers were once expected to perform a song or play a tune, and the concept of performance that links Halloween rhyming to an earlier mumming tradition is still prevalent, although many children are not allowed to engage in this activity because their parents consider it begging. In fact, the custom is also known as Halloween begging. Frequently, people describe it as a nuisance, since the children tend to ring the bell during the evening meal.

For several weeks before Halloween, then, and not on Halloween itself, children may interrupt someone’s daily routine by ringing the doorbell to ask, “Anything for Halloween?” or to chant a Halloween rhyme. Unlike trick-or-treating, which is restricted to a specific evening and a specific time and is thus predictable and expected, Halloween rhyming is unpredictable. It might take place at any time, sometimes long in advance of Halloween itself. Also, since money is the expected gift, most people do not welcome many visitors a night. If someone feels that a child has come rhyming too early in the season, that person feels free to refuse the child. Similarly, on nights nearer to October 31, if a person feels that enough children have visited for one night, then the children will be told so. In the United States, if people do not want to engage in the trick-or-treating ritual, they either go out for the evening or leave the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Irish Christmas
• 2. The Personality of the Season: Rhyming, Pranking, and Bonfires
• 3. Harvest
• 4. The Feast of Autumn
• 5. Oiche Shamhana, Night of the Spirits
• 6. Tie the Nine Knots: Games, Divination, and Belief
• 7. Gender Construction and Cultural Hegemony in Northern Ireland
• References
• Index