Autumn: Hallowe'en

Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly...
The main calendar event of autumn, crouching at the end of October like a black cat peering into November and the beginning of winter is Hallowe’en (a term which derives from “All Hallows Eve”).

Originally a Celtic festival, Hallowe’en is now particularly associated with America, and elements of the US version have become globalised, mainly through our familiarity with films and TV shows. The key elements of Hallowe’en are now quite familiar, although some of their significance has been lost (or mangled) in cultural translation:

(S)mashing Pumpkins
Look in the window of any shop at this time of year and the chances are you will see a sinister grinning face cut out of an enormous pumpkin – perhaps with a light inside producing a supernatural glow from the eyes and serrated teeth. (This is known in North America as a Jack-o'-lantern.)

Although pumpkins are fairly common throughout Europe and North America throughout the year they seem to come into their own at Hallowe’en. Part of the botanical family that includes zucchini, courgettes and marrows, pumpkins make excellent autumn/ winter dishes and can be sliced, diced, mashed, boiled and baked. As well as making great comfort food (something hot and filling which is quite simple and unsophisticated), pumpkins feature in the traditional Thanksgiving dinner in North America.

In Italy, pumpkins seem significant merely for their seeds - and as the source material for self-consciously foreign Jack-o'-lanterns, visible mainly in shops and bars. Zucca (Italian for pumpkin) happens to be the name of the iconic café in the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan’s Piazza Duomo, where Gaspare Campari launched his eponymous drink.)


Trick or treat?
Trick or treat (often used in the phrase "to go trick or treating") is the main activity associated with Hallowe'en. Let's have a quick look at the what the words trick and treat mean first:

• A treat is something very nice (and usually unexpected). For example, if a child at school gets excellent grades in the end of year tests, their parents may take them to a theme park or the cinema as a treat. You can also treat someone to something, such as a free meal in a restaurant – or, indeed, you can treat yourself, or give yourself a treat.
  (Note that treat also has the completely different meaning of “give medical attention / care to”, e.g. a doctor can treat a patient for a disease or other condition, such as chronic (long-term) backache.)
  
• A trick is the complete opposite. If you trick someone (or play a trick on them) it means you do something horrible to upset that person.
  

On Hallowe’en children wearing fancy dress (including witches' hats, vampire teeth, skeleton costumes, devil masks and anything else supernatural or creepy) knock on people’s doors and shout “Trick or treat!”. The person inside the house can either choose to give the children a small gift or risk having a trick played on them. Typical tricks might include strewing toilet paper all over their garden, spraying silly string over their front door, knocking over their rubbish bins or sealing up their letter box with wax. (In Britain, depending on the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood and the region the occupant of the house may either put this down (attribute) to youthful exuberance or start an argument which can escalate into a full-scale dispute with the police being called.
Conversely, trick or treat is a well-established and accepted part of North American culture (where it originates from in its modern form). People prepare for the arrival of the trick or treaters by baking little cakes and making sweets which they hand out to their ghoulish visitors. In Britain the tradition has never really been integrated into the cultural life of the nation, so people are uncertain how to react to having a gang of vampires and ghouls turn up (arrive) on their doorstep. A lot of children simply take the occasion as an opportunity to demand some loose change, while those in more deprived areas might actually use the situation as a chance to settle scores on unpopular neighbours or to terrorise older residents, many of whom don’t really understand what the whole thing is about.

(On the topic of socially-accepted forms of manic but non-threatening behaviour, I have to say that I found the celebrations in Milan for Carnevale in February something of a revelation. The soft-centred - and largely alcohol-free - daytime festivities in Piazza Duomo (intended mainly for children) are a riot with thousands of people "attacking" each other with confetti (coriandoli) and silly string – but without any of the associated tensions or public order problems that usually marr similar events in the UK (in particular the Notting Hill Carnival). I think this will be a future (seasonal) blog post.)
Monster Munch
Hallowe’en parties seem to be mainly either the preserve of either children or an excuse for clubbers to dress up as ghouls and vampires at a themed event. As with 5th November, there isn’t an associated holiday, widely-observed religious festival like Christmas (but see All Saints Day below) or critical secular moment, such as New Year’s Eve (particularly on the following day) so the prospect of a wild celebration followed by what could be a working day has little appeal to people who have already left school or have only just heard of Facebook.
However, a few traditions survive, notably traditional Hallowe’en games, such as “bobbing for apples”, which involves biting an apple floating around in a bowl of water – try it: it’s harder than it sounds.
Incidentally, All Saints Day on the 1st November and All Souls Day on the 2nd are purely religious occasions for churchgoers in the UK – very much a minority of the population. All Souls Day, which is hugely significant here in Italy, seems to be a particularly Catholic occasion. There is no UK equivalent of the streams of Italian families tidying up relatives' graves and placing bunches of fresh flowers on them in preparation for the main All Souls Day - or the all-night graveside vigils held throughout the (particularly Spanish-speaking) Catholic world.)

Is there anyone there?
Both Hallowe’en and All Souls Day are characterised by radically different ways of thinking about death, the after-life and the “other side” in general. Whereas Hallowe’en is treated as a bit of a laugh – with kids dressing up as characters from the Adams Family – All Souls Day is a serious, sombre occasion in countries where the Church is still highly influential. However, in a largely secular country like Britain – and in the non-religious sections of North American society – the “big questions” still need to be addressed: life, the universe and everything. Perhaps the folk culture of the past, pagan traditions and modern horror films that draw on ancient superstitions and legends seem more palatable to those who have little or no connection with conventional organised religion. Just as Dan Brown tapped into a vast subterranean reservoir of secular interest in things spiritual and religious by means of the best-selling mystery thriller “The Da Vinci Code” – so the appearance of miniature mummies, ghosts and Freddie Krugers at Hallowe’en could represent one aspect of a nagging secular suspicion that there might be something more to life than PSPs, Nikes and Chicken McNuggets®.

Autumn: Harvest Festival and Thanksgiving

Bringing in the sheaves
Living in a city you have a hugely distorted sense of the traditional significance of the seasons. The end of the summer and the beginning of autumn is when crops are harvested and all sorts of vegetables, such as carrots, potatoes, leeks, turnips, marrows and pumpkins reach maturity. Since most types of food are available all year round (such as strawberries flown in at Christmas time) we city-dwellers have little appreciation of how the seasons shape life in the country.

The custom of the harvest festival still survives in churches (and some schools). Produce from the fields and from gardens is brought into the church and the congregation offer thanks for the natural bounty supplied by the Lord (or whoever you think supplies it – perhaps for most people in Britain it is now Tesco’s, the UK’s largest supermarket chain).

While many schools and schoolteachers are reluctant to promote religion when they lack religious convictions themselves, the harvest festival is still a feature of British school life (with or without religious overtones). It seems like a good idea to not take the food we eat for granted and to at least consider that while food may be abundant in the rich countries of the west and the northern hemisphere its scarcity is a fact of life in many other parts of the less developed (or poor) world.

I remember when I was at school that everyone would bring something from home – perhaps a tin of baked beans or a packet of biscuits and it would all be stacked on the stage for a full-school assembly (which, looking back now, must have made the headmaster and the senior teachers look slightly like delegates at a trade fair promoting a range of household brands). After the service the food would be donated to a local old people’s home or children’s home. I actually still think that’s a good thing to do – whether or not there’s an accompanying religious service.

In a similar vein, the American festival of Thanksgiving, held in November, marks the first harvest produced by the Pilgrim Fathers – the Puritan settlers who left Europe and landed in New England. Thanksgiving is only celebrated in the US (and Canada) and is a bit of a mystery to most Brits who only really know about it from films and TV programmes or the fact that Wall Street is closed for a public holiday. Thanksgiving dinner features a turkey (which is what the British have for Christmas dinner) with cranberry sauce (ditto) and pumpkin pie (which doesn’t really exist in the UK).

With a significant North American expatriate population in (west) London (due mainly, but not entirely to the phenomenal success of the romantic comedy “Notting Hill”*), some shops now cater for customers in search of typical Thanksgiving fare. A posh (high-class) butcher near Holland Park tube station (close to the London School of English, where I used to teach) has a sign in the window at this time of year advising its well-heeled stateside clientele that they can now order their Thanksgiving turkeys. I’m sure a similar offer must be made to the Americans and Canadians in Milan by at least one enterprising butcher, but I haven’t seen any firsthand evidence of this. (If you’re an American or Canadian in Milan, or a butcher, I’d love to hear.)

*Click here to see a picture of Notting Hill Underground station and other picture postcard views of London.