Halloween in Britain is a curious case: an ancient native festival that faded almost completely in England, was exported to America by Irish and Scottish emigrants, and came back a century later in American packaging.
Samhain
The origin is the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced roughly SOW-in), marking the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. The boundary between the living and the dead was believed to thin, and the dead could cross it — so fires were lit, food was set out, and people disguised themselves so that any wandering spirits would not recognise them.
The Church later placed All Saints’ Day on 1 November and All Souls’ on the 2nd. The evening before became All Hallows’ Eve, contracted to Halloween.
Why England lost it
The Reformation removed the theology of purgatory and with it the point of praying for the dead, and Protestant England let the associated customs lapse. What is more, from 1605 England acquired a rival autumn festival with fire, sweets and national approval: Bonfire Night, five days later. For three centuries the 5th comprehensively beat the 31st.
Scotland and Ireland kept their traditions, and emigrants took them to North America, where Halloween grew into a major commercial festival.
The turnip
Before pumpkins, British lanterns were carved from turnips or swedes. They are dense, awkward and much harder to hollow out, and the resulting faces — small, gnarled, lit from within — are considerably more sinister than anything achievable in a pumpkin. Museums in Scotland and Ireland display surviving examples, and they are genuinely unsettling.
Pumpkins were adopted in America simply because they were plentiful, large and easy to carve. They came back to Britain with everything else.
Guising
The Scottish tradition, and older than trick-or-treating. Children dress up — guising, from disguise — and go door to door, but with a crucial difference: they are expected to perform. A song, a joke, a poem or a party trick earns the treat. It is not a threat, it is a transaction, and many Scots still consider “trick or treat” to be lazy freeloading.
The reimport
Trick-or-treating arrived in Britain in the 1980s, helped along by American films and by supermarkets recognising a gap in the retail calendar. It was resisted for a while as an American import — a common complaint in the 1990s — and that objection has now largely disappeared. Halloween is the third-biggest retail event of the British year after Christmas and Easter.
Doing it in Britain
The convention is that houses taking part signal it: a lit pumpkin in the window, decorations, a bowl by the door. Houses with no pumpkin and no lights are not participating and should be left alone, and British children are generally taught this quite firmly.
Apple bobbing survives at parties, as does the older and messier version in which apples or treacle scones are hung from string and must be eaten without hands.