I am aware you know there is a Santa Claus. There is also a Halloween, a real night of real pookas, witches, goblins, of mischievous wild spirits a-flitting, burning pagan flames against the snapquick velveteen of wild hours between the dying of gentle October, under a fat and Christian moon, and this birthing of harsh November, its frosted soul, its scouring winds from the highlands beyond God’s caring, its Children of Lit sad swansong for autumn from the lakes, primal coils of green eels with madly pagan eyes in its toothed rivers of cold. Yes, Virginia, before that there is the unhallowed night of Halloween, here possession of all the people after the Darkness falls and the chapels are locked. And that is Halloween.
I know, dear Virginia, that you are a good and gentle child, with a space for angels in your eyes. But, if you were here at home on Halloween night, you would be possessed too. It happens to everybody except maybe, the very holiest and the oldest of priests and nuns. It happens after teatime and it happens always, after the mothers of Ireland have tried their best to celebrate a Christian Halloween around the gaiety and comfort of home hearths burning. They have sweets and nuts and apples, apples in bowls of water slipping away from the biting, apples hanging from ceilings, dancing away from white teeth snapping.
This the mothers have. And Blindman’s Buff around the kitchens, and fortune-telling with children blindfolded again, spun around and round, and then seeking their fortunes from the items in the saucers on the kitchen table. Water, and you will cross water for foreign lands. The wedding ring, and you will marry, the coin, you will be wealthy, the holy medal, and you will join the Church, priest or nun, the touch of soil, and you will own a big farm of land and live happy ever after.
But, Virginia, the wild spirits outside, released for one night, are like Pied Pipers that suck all the children through the doors, sooner or later, and under the devilment of the stars. And the same spirits have influence on the mothers and fathers too, for they let them go out, knowing well what they will be doing.
And, Virginia, if you were here, you might be like Susie McGurn when she was nine that climbed up to the very top of our huge apple tree with a bottle of kerosene and a box of matches. She filled her mad little mouth with kerosene, did Susie, blowing it out across a freshly struck match, so that she was spouting great tongues of scarlet flames onto the blackness, dripping down the lichened arms of the shocked old tree. And came to no harm at all. The spirits look after their own.
Or, Virginia, in whose own mouth butter would not melt, you might find yourself, despite yourself, knocking on the knockers of the quiet old doors of the old folk, all pains and aches and alone.
Or stuffing fireworks into the darkness. Or opening some henhouse door and chasing out all the frightened hens and ducks. Or riding great black bullocks bareback, maybe across the river. Or sawing away the supports of the foot-sticks across drains that brought decent men home from pubs, they that could be drowned when their bridges collapsed under their aled feet. You might do any or all of these things on Halloween night, you not being mistress of your own little self at all.
The parents lose their heads too, Virginia, and that is why there is really a Halloween.
Your father is not your father that night, nor even your mother your mother. It was not children who found Hughie Logan drunk, before his own door, in the bed of his asscart. It was not children who took him out, disassembled the cart, brought it inside the house, reassembled it, put the donkey back inside the shafts before the fireplace, and put the sleeping Hughie back in the cart again. And it was not children who put jollip in poor Joe Ward’s tea either.
Jollip, dear Virginia, is a fast-acting laxative which should only be given to pigs.
You do not need to know anything about it.
So you see now, child a gradh, that there is a real Halloween. Strange wild spirits take possession of all of us for just one pagan night. In the morning they are gone. The chapel doors open early, the bells of God seem to ring a little louder than usual.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the October 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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