Halloween is very clearly out of control.
You could put it in dollars and cents: Americans will spend something like $13 billion on the holiday this year, almost four times more than we did 20 years ago. Even with the massive inflation of the past decade, that is bonkers. Halloween now ranks up with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for annual spending, and nobody has to buy any Halloween presents or go to an overpriced brunch. Bobbing for apples is a lot cheaper than the omelet station.
But a better measurement may be time and effort. What was at the turn of this century still mostly a one-day celebration now sprawls over two weeks.
We’ve long had the Halloween retail blitz starting immediately after the back-to-school displays come down around Labor Day. That’s just the warmup before America’s best and most badly neglected holiday, Thanksgiving, gives way to the trillion-dollar Christmas spend-a-thon. Now, however, it’s way beyond the retail world. Many communities now host “witches ride” events, “trunk-or-treat” candy and costume jamborees and huge, expensive Halloween parades.
Multiple costumes over multiple days, full-sized candy bars in trick-or-treaters’ bags and tens of thousands of 12-foot-tall skeletons. Like I said, out of control.
There are a lot of ways to explain how Americans became Halloween-obsessed. We could cite the decline in religious participation, which once made the holiday taboo for many families. Or we might discuss the extended adolescence that has more and more Americans living (and celebrating) like kids into their 30s. We could even think about the social media incentives for dressing up and decorating.
But if we want to get to the root of the Halloween craze, we’d better blame it on the Irish.
There have been five great waves of immigration to the United States, and the first two were heavily Irish, starting with the first mass migration, that of Scots-Irish Protestants, many of whom came before the country was founded. But the 1840s brought a twin surge to our shores: Germans, many Catholic, fleeing political upheaval and oppression, and the Irish, almost all Catholic, driven west by successive famines.
You know a lot about how these groups changed American culture, and maybe even how the new voters and the anti-immigrant backlash changed our politics, including the creation of the Republican Party, ending of slavery and giving us the miseries of Prohibition.
But look to our holidays if you want to hear the echoes of those tumultuous times when America struggled to absorb so many millions of new residents who were so different from the largely Protestant, mostly English nation suddenly made accessible by transatlantic steamship travel in the middle of the 19th century.
The Germans gave us a great deal of what came to be seen as a quintessentially American Christmas. It was German immigrants who brought Santa Claus, advent calendars, trimming the tree, stockings hung by the chimney with care and all that jazz. And that’s even aside from the Easter Bunny and Groundhog Day, a double shot of holiday rodents, both vestiges of that wave of German immigration 175 years ago.
But Halloween belongs to the Irish.
There had been Irish immigration to America before the Potato Famine ravaged the island from 1845 to 1852, but it had been small in number and often from wealthier, urban centers. When the blight hit, peaking in 1847, it killed at least 1 million Irish out of a total population of fewer than 9 million people. Estimates vary, but something like twice that number fled the country over the course of the famine, with America overwhelmingly their destination.
Other than their great number, these Irish immigrants were different from previous new arrivals because many of them were absolutely destitute and many came from rural areas. And if you were from the Irish countryside you likely observed Samhain, which is Gaelic for “summer’s end.”
It predates the addition of All Saints’ Day, which came about in the seventh century, adding a Christian twist on what had been a very pagan observance. The Druids held that at that moment, about halfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, that “the ‘veil’ between the worlds of the living and the dead thins, allowing ghosts, spirits, and demons to return to Earth.”
We lost the Celtic word, replacing Samhain with a reference to All Saints’ Day, formerly known to many as All Hallows’ Day, as in all the holy ones. So the night before would be All Hallows’ Eve, which got smooshed right up into Halloween.
The jack-o’-lantern is the child of an Irish turnip carved with a frightening visage to scare off evil spirits — New World produce with a wider, more expressive face for carving. The costumes are a direct loan from Samhain, during which Celts wore costumes to trick and confuse the evil spirits. Same with the trick-or-treating, which grew out of the food and sweets left out to appease the wandering spirits.
By the time the Irish reached America, the practice of playfully appeasing those pretending to be spirits had become part of the culture. So too had “mischief night,” or, more ominously, “Devil’s night,” on which what were supposed to be good-natured pranks were carried out on the day before the feast.
All of these things were basically unknown in America prior to the late 1840s, and for decades after the Irish brought them they would have been deemed alien and menacing by the dominant culture in America. But as Irish families climbed the ladder of success, acceptance and assimilation, they brought their strange ways along with them. So much so that of the 30 million or so Americans of Irish ancestry today, most will observe the vestiges of these rituals without even knowing their origins.
And that’s how America can turn one of the worst famines in history into a $13 billion party.
