Halloween 1994 - 4 November 1994

For a day and a night at least, the resounding political lament "been there too long" was pierced by the small insistent voices of little children on the evening of Monday 31 October, millions of doors were knocked on and opened in response to the cry "trick or treat".

If there's one Irish Institution other than the practice of charm or blarney that came into the United States and conquered, it is the secular festival of Halloween. I stress secular because so far as I can discover few secular or if you like pagan festivals passed so solidly into Christian practice. It was originally a Celtic festival called Samhain and Celtic scholars or crossword buffs perhaps will no doubt be eager to translate it for me, Samhain was the Celtic harvest festival, but also thought of as the time when the spirits of the dead came back to their old haunts, I suppose is the proper word.

Until the 9th century, it seems people were content to accept these visitations as the return from the underworld of demons and goblins and other monsters. How and why the Roman Catholic church managed in 800 something AD to introduce this weird festival and its usages into the Christian liturgy is to me a remarkable mystery and must remain one pending an explanatory fax from Rome.

Anyway, as we like to say when we've told you something irrelevant to the story and ought to move on. Anyway, the original pagan festival became All Saints' Day. Now it was saints not demons that came back and 31 October became All Hallows' Eve. I believe there is no record of daubing faces with sort of red dye, mask-wearing, tricking and treating in this country until the middle of the last century and the arrival in lively multitudes of the Irish.

The interesting switch here is that apparently right from the start, except among the extremely devout, they cast off the religious elements and turned it into a children's holiday as somebody said of trick or treating and general mischief making. If so, the mischief making was pretty innocent and wherever they settled, the Irish for a generation or two were always the poorest people in town. No wonder they sent children off very often their own to knock on the doors of the comfortable and say "trick or treat" in the full expectation that nobody wants to have a scary trick practised on them and would willingly cough up the cake, a pie, a candy bar or some such.

So last Monday inside the lift in our building, there was posted a sheet of paper with two parallel lists written on it. On the left a list of tenants willing to subject themselves come twilight to the knockings and gigglings of children in the building and to provide them with a treat. On the right side was a list of children willing to offer themselves up for the reception of these goodies.

You'll have notice the phrase "children in the building", it's the first sinister chance in the once general custom of kissing your tots goodbye and good luck and sending them out into the night to roam and knock and go on a cornucopia of treats. Kids used to love to do this the way we, when a little older and in another country, set out into the darkness of Christmas Eve with four or five other songsters and jogged around the town till all hours carolling outside houses that were well lit and seemed prosperous and might, did have you in for a mince pie or better a first swig of the demon wine of Scotland, but to send your children out on the town without a protective adult these nights would be taken in some quarters as a form of child neglect punishable in the courts.

For more years now than I care to count – 10, 20 – the last thing on any parent's mind is to send small children or for that matter young teenagers out into the night for any purpose secular or holy. And as you no doubt know in some cities there are curfews for people under 18, I don't need to tell you that the painful restriction of Halloween, just one apartment building in cities or one street block under adult patrol in the countryside, is yet another response to the growing and seemingly incurable affliction of public random crime.

Now most crime, as you've no doubt heard, is committed between members of the same family, most homicides at any rate or between close friends or members of one family feuding with another. And always swelling the homicides in Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit and half a dozen cities you'd never guess at are the ritual murders of teenage gangs who have replaced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the triple pledge respect, reputation, retaliation. Which means pitifully once you're initiated into a gang, you earn respect by a serious mugging or attempted shooting, reputation by clocking up a record of shootings and retaliation by avenging the wounds or the murders of your own gangsters by another murder on the old principle of an eye for an eye.

But, in spite of this remarkable closed circuit of crime, which eats away at the decent community life of this country, there's a great deal of random street crime and what could be more appetising, likely to be safer than a swift assault on a gaggle of small children. There's been enough of it in the recent past to have some cities post warnings in the week before Halloween urging parents to forego Halloween altogether, a cruel blow surely to the pleasures of the young, they are the usually fundamentalist Christians who dislike very much the clause in the Bill of Rights in the First Amendment that dictates the separation of church and state.

The extremist wing of them longs to make this nation a Christian nation against the lively presence of so many other religions here and against the unwavering rulings of the United States Supreme Court, they take every opportunity of introducing Christian custom symbols into public places and, just as resolutely and just as tiresomely, the civil liberties maniacs not just civil rights upholders just as grimly fight and oppose the militant Christians and they usually win. As for instance whenever a church mounts a little creche in say a village square up jumps the American Civil Liberties Union, goes to court and is conceded yet another victory by pointing out that the creche is on display on public property maintained and paid for with the taxes of Muslims, Jews, Agnostics and heathens.

But now Halloween, the latest bait to the religious right. In at least five states, they have this year begged or urged or tried to order families to abandon Halloween or change its rituals drastically and celebrated as a sacred Christian festival, because they've just discovered perhaps that all these years, for a century and a half, America has been practising without shame a purely pagan festival and perpetuating in the innocent young a belief in the most wicked and primitive superstitions black cats, witches, ghosts, scary monsters, deaths heads made out of pumpkins that healthy Puritan fruit if ever there was one.

So in Maryland, New York, Ohio, Georgia, California – only of course in certain places abounding with Christian fundamentalists, the public elementary schools fearing the prospect of litigation have reluctantly told children to come to school in their normal dress and forgo the innumerable comic or ghastly masks available.

Of course, the first protests have come from the manufacturers and especially the retailers in hot Republican territory of masks, lifelike but in this context sinister, of Bill Clinton. I myself was about to appear as Madonna if we'd stayed in New York, but we were flying off to family. Still, I was cheered to arrive at the airport and duck under a great sweeping sheet of something swaying slightly like a giant cobweb, it was a giant cobweb reaching without explanation from one shining pillar to another squeaky clean counter, candlelit pumpkins everywhere, one or two small passengers who plainly from their scarred or deformed faces had just arrived from or were on their way to the underworld, it was very rousing.

In some cities the brethren announced that Halloween night would be replaced by Hallelujah night and prizes would be given to tots mind you for the best biblical costume. Not much public sympathy I'm afraid for the prim little one who chose to come as David instead of Dracula. The way around this in some wicked place was to appear as a ferocious Goliath or defying the parents too now as one or other of the more disreputable inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The television stations, I'm happy to say, paid no attention whatsoever to the reformers. Of our 72 operating channels, I guess that at least 40 were drenched with blood on Monday night, every horror film ever made. An actual revival of such old Saturday night series as Chiller Theatre and the more vivid films of Hammer Productions and of the Japanese company that gave us the incomparable Godzilla. Also, a public station notable for it's nightly one-hour profile biographies of the famous – from Julius Caesar to Humphrey Bogart, Charles Darwin to Charles Lawton – came out with a piece that drained the previous horrors away with a documentary life proving, and it was quite true by the way, the essential love-ability of Vincent Price. It was a kind of final perch of pity and terror worthy of the Greeks.

Halloween, however celebrated, gave us too a blessed surcease or pause what is now called a hiatus from you'd guess the election, so aren't you happy to hear that my time is up and I shall respond to the sensible suggestion of an old lady who wrote to me long ago just before an election saying "instead of telling us who might get in, would it not be wiser to wait till the next time and tell us who did?" So it would.

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