The Queenager: Why I hate Halloween

What is it with Halloween? Am I the only person who can’t stand it?

The whole thing gives me the creeps … and not in the way it’s supposed to. My street is festooned with plastic cobwebs, my daughter is ringing up the plastic tat on my Amazon (I got a message from her from uni this morning: “Mum, bought a few bits for Halloween, hope ok?”). A few bits? She’d spent £30 on black stockings, a fake plastic arm, a white wig and green ribbons. (Nope, me neither!)

Halloween is all sweets and dressing up (if you are considering putting your pet in ghostly shrouds or bat wings … please don’t. The RSPCA have said it’s cruel, that costumes can impede pet movement and even asphyxiate cats. Just because they’re doing it on Instagram, please don’t try it at home).

Closer to home, the shops are awash with fake spiders, £5 pumpkins, multi-pack jumbo bags of e-number-rich garish sweets, plastic costumes, green hair and other horrors. The whole lot will be in the bin by Friday and we’ll be picking plastic webs and that ghastly white foam out of the hedge for months. It’s more commercial than Valentine’s Day and seems to go on for longer than Christmas.

When did it all get so out of control? From school finish till midnight on Thursday my doorbell will be going as troops of ‘trick or treaters’ stand sulkily on the steps demanding more sugar. One year I decided to go all traditional and hand out tangerines or apples instead; I was met with abuse. Not proper tricks or anything, oh no. Not now that even throwing flour or an egg can be met with an ASBO (according to warnings from Suffolk police).

I know I sound all bah-humbug. And, okay, maybe I am. But I have tried. I promise. When my girls were small I’d take their little sticky hands and hoy around the neighbourhood knocking on doors and screeching, “Trick or treat” at whoever opened the door. The evening always ended either in tears or with them being sick – or both.

One year we went to St John’s Wood in North London, home to many an American merchant banker. It looked like a film set. The sweets were from Marks and Spencer and the houses decorated by interior designers. My youngest came home with an entire black bin bag full of candy – conspicuous consumption gone mad. It made me think rather wistfully of Halloween in my childhood.

What Halloween used to be like

I had a black witch’s hat and we’d get wet hair bobbing for apples. It was a tame warm-up for the real action on bonfire night, the main event, with its leaping flames and frenzied fireworks, massed crowds of people, “Penny for the Guy” and the dark night illuminated with colour as the bangs made you jump.

Now it’s all reversed. Most councils have given up bonfires and fireworks as a health and safety risk while Halloween – a commercialised American import (just like proms at the end of school with stretch limos and ridiculous dresses.) Since when did our children feel the need to live inside a tacky American teen movie?

There is a deeper point here too. Autumn is a time of shedding. Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween has been celebrated for two thousand years. It marked the harvest’s end and the fallow period where nature dies back and rests.

The Roman festival of Ferralia at this time also celebrated the passing of the dead. We bob for apples because this was the time to celebrate Pomona, the Roman Goddess of fruit. Halloween is an abbreviation of All Hallow’s Een: The evening before November 1st which was All Saints Day in the Christian church (they loved incorporating existing pagan rituals into the calendar).

This celebrated the saints, before All Souls Day on November 2nd – the official day of commemoration of the faithful departed (in Mexico, this is the Day of the Dead). All over the world from Peru to Poland, this is the time to remember loved ones who have died. A day to go to the graveyard to pay tribute and sit with grief, to make the food that the departed ones loved. To talk about them to younger generations. To incorporate the stories of beloved ancestors into the family narrative. To do something in memory of a loved one who has died.

The Halloween hoopla of ghosts and witches is based on this tradition.

This IS a special time of the year

There’s a sense that at this time of year, as nature itself dies off, the membrane between the living and the dead is at its most permeable. It is a sacred act to mourn those we’ve loved and lost and honour them. To feel their presence as the fecundity of the harvest turns to the chill of winter as the year itself turns.

In the oldest stories, autumn is when the gods of fertility return under ground, where the land and life goes fallow, where Ianna sat impaled on a stake in the underworld, waiting, regenerating until spring returns and she springs forth again. It is a moment of celebrating the end of the light before the return of the darkness.

It’s an important moment in the year, one which our culture with its avoidance of death and its rituals could do well to honour once more. The plastic sweet-fest which this once soulful tradition has descended into is a sacrilege to its true meaning and purpose.

Rather than wallowing in tat, I’d rather our children learnt that death is a part of life, to honour those who have died, to learn their family traditions, to cook the food of memory and listen to ancestral stories. Whether or not you are a Christian and attend Church (it was Pope Gregory who invented All Saint’s Day to annexe these pagan traditions in the sixth century), we all need to remember those have lost.

Our modern culture is terrible at death, we hide it away, don’t speak about it, medicalise it. The idea of death saves us, it’s what gives life meaning. Using Halloween rituals to land that message is something that would be worth passing on to our children. Maybe amidst the ghouls and tat on Thursday we can remember that.

What do you think about Halloween? Am I an old grinch or is there some merit in this?

By Eleanor Mills

Eleanor Mills is the Founder of NOON.org.uk a platform for women in midlife. A previous version of this piece appeared in The Telegraph.