Further to my last, I found this elsewhere on t' interweb and I'm sure many of the older generation, not only in the Celtic parts of the kingdom,will recall similar experiences of Halloween:
'As a kid growing up in 1970s Edinburgh, there was no such thing as “trick or treat.” We went guising. Halloween is a traditional Celtic festival where children would dress up and go round the doors in the neighbourhood singing songs or telling jokes for money. We made lanterns out of turnips, not pumpkins, and the traditions had many sinister roots.
If you were invited into someone’s home and did your party piece, you could be asked to take part in ceremonies which had their root in trial by ordeal of witches. Basins were filled with water and filled with apples and nuts and children would have to duck their heads under the water to retrieve them. This was called dooking and was a representation of ducking of witches. Another tradition was hanging scones covered in treacle from strings, and the children would have to eat the scones from the strings, getting covered in treacle as a result. This represented the hanging of witches.
I used to make as much as £10 back in the 70s, about £150 to £200 by today’s standards. This was usually spent on fireworks for November the 5th.
Scots and Irish immigrants took Halloween to America with them and it stayed as part of the tradition of Celtic families until the 50s and the 60s when capitalists began to see a commercial opportunity in it. It then came back over the Ocean in its current Americanised form as trick or treat. The vast majority of Scottish kids these days couldn’t tell you anything about the former tradition and think that Halloween is an American tradition.
Scottish Hogmanay traditions have also gone the same way. Commercialised beyond recognition, and the old traditions of first-footing your friends and neighbours and all the accompanying superstitions have fallen by the wayside to make way for huge organised events.
People talk a lot these days of their cultural identity being under threat... but surely the biggest and most dangerous threat to cultural identity has always come from America. You only need to look at the High Streets and the language kids use these days to see the impact.'
Cultural identity? Less and less seem interested in preserving our past.
Tom
