My grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly, who grew up in Bantry Bay, used to tell me of the trick or treating customs she celebrated as a girl. They dressed up in rags, they made and wore masks to disguise themselves so the uneasy returning dead let loose from the side (or barrows) to wander the earth for one night, wouldn't recognize or take them, and boys made bull roarers from pig bladders to scare the malicious ones away. They trick or treated. They had to either sing, dance, recite a poem (perform) and only then were they were given a treat...sometimes even a shiny copper half-penny.
She was quite irritated by the American custom of kids demanding candy without first performing. Id bring home from school the American traditions and she would "correct me, show me how it was supposed to be done. I do remember her giving us walnuts, oranges and apples. We played games: bobbed for apples, chased apples on a string with our teeth, peeled apples in one long core and let it fall to the foor to see what letter it would take (who we would marry), etc. I remember she lit a candle and I used to jump over it a la Jack be nimble /Jack be quick/ candlestick. She told me of hollowing out turnips to protect the wondows and offer a light for the souls returning home. Pumpkins are a new world food that replaced the big turnips of Ireland.
She also burned rosemary and sage from the garden in the newly lain fire: smudging the house to cleanse the air/banish the spirits on Nov. 1, and of course, we went to mass to pray for the dead. I remember all this so vividly because I used to help her with these tasks (which I thought odd), I was 5-10 years old, during the 1950s. We lived out in the wilds of N. California, where she singlehandedly raised my brother and I.
Soda bread and tea were made. She'd cut a deep cross on the top of the round loaf baked in a cast iron pan(other times of the year it was merely made in rectangular loaf pans). She told us of the special barmbrack bread but she rarely made it as she couldn't be bothered with making yeasted breads. But we knew the significance about receiving the ring, the coin or the rag.
She said, that in Ireland, they cleaned the house before Halloween, threw out any standing water, decorated /framed the windows with ivy, mistletoe and evergreens, placed hollowed turnips in the windows to light the way for the dead. They put out the fire, cleaned the hearth (once she used a plastic bucked, and it promptly melted when she put the hot ashes in), relit it from the bonfire on the hill at the farm (she used the pilot light on the stove).
At our farm, Coom an Or, my great-great grandfather drove his cattle between two bonfires, and he also made Catherine wheels out of wagon wheels covered in tar and rolled them down the hill... this custom was also done at Beltaine. Not all the All Hallows events practiced were solely for the Celtic New Year.
Some customs were used on St Stephen's Day (the wren on a stick), and Dec 31, and May 1.) Interestingly enough, she did pronounce the "m" in Samhain (it was sort of an m/v), she did learn school (Gaelic League days), she said it was not aspirated (the term they used for changing the s of certain letters. I know that because the typography of the day did not allow for making the dot o aspirated letter, that h's were introduced (thus creating a lexicographical nightmare)...
I found out later, when I attended UC Berkeley's rather rigorous Celtic Studies program (1999-2000) that sometimes that "h" was used in the medieval MSS as an aspiration, but dots were also more commonly used... We translated the Tain(s) Bo Cuailnge, & Fraoch, as well as other stories. I alsc studied with the late Provessor Alan Dudes, and collected much of my family's folklore for the foll archives. Anyway, my grannie argued that the sowen pronunciation was a post 1900 change, and, therefore, wrong. It may have been a Cork dialect or custom/or even just learned wrong... But she always fiercely tracking words in her Irish font dictionary dating from the 1880 or 1890s...Dineen’s think. but the cover was burned off in a kitchen fire.
She was quite irritated by the American custom of kids demanding candy without first performing. Id bring home from school the American traditions and she would "correct me, show me how it was supposed to be done. I do remember her giving us walnuts, oranges and apples. We played games: bobbed for apples, chased apples on a string with our teeth, peeled apples in one long core and let it fall to the foor to see what letter it would take (who we would marry), etc. I remember she lit a candle and I used to jump over it a la Jack be nimble /Jack be quick/ candlestick. She told me of hollowing out turnips to protect the wondows and offer a light for the souls returning home. Pumpkins are a new world food that replaced the big turnips of Ireland.
She also burned rosemary and sage from the garden in the newly lain fire: smudging the house to cleanse the air/banish the spirits on Nov. 1, and of course, we went to mass to pray for the dead. I remember all this so vividly because I used to help her with these tasks (which I thought odd), I was 5-10 years old, during the 1950s. We lived out in the wilds of N. California, where she singlehandedly raised my brother and I.
Soda bread and tea were made. She'd cut a deep cross on the top of the round loaf baked in a cast iron pan(other times of the year it was merely made in rectangular loaf pans). She told us of the special barmbrack bread but she rarely made it as she couldn't be bothered with making yeasted breads. But we knew the significance about receiving the ring, the coin or the rag.
She said, that in Ireland, they cleaned the house before Halloween, threw out any standing water, decorated /framed the windows with ivy, mistletoe and evergreens, placed hollowed turnips in the windows to light the way for the dead. They put out the fire, cleaned the hearth (once she used a plastic bucked, and it promptly melted when she put the hot ashes in), relit it from the bonfire on the hill at the farm (she used the pilot light on the stove).
At our farm, Coom an Or, my great-great grandfather drove his cattle between two bonfires, and he also made Catherine wheels out of wagon wheels covered in tar and rolled them down the hill... this custom was also done at Beltaine. Not all the All Hallows events practiced were solely for the Celtic New Year.
Some customs were used on St Stephen's Day (the wren on a stick), and Dec 31, and May 1.) Interestingly enough, she did pronounce the "m" in Samhain (it was sort of an m/v), she did learn school (Gaelic League days), she said it was not aspirated (the term they used for changing the s of certain letters. I know that because the typography of the day did not allow for making the dot o aspirated letter, that h's were introduced (thus creating a lexicographical nightmare)...
I found out later, when I attended UC Berkeley's rather rigorous Celtic Studies program (1999-2000) that sometimes that "h" was used in the medieval MSS as an aspiration, but dots were also more commonly used... We translated the Tain(s) Bo Cuailnge, & Fraoch, as well as other stories. I alsc studied with the late Provessor Alan Dudes, and collected much of my family's folklore for the foll archives. Anyway, my grannie argued that the sowen pronunciation was a post 1900 change, and, therefore, wrong. It may have been a Cork dialect or custom/or even just learned wrong... But she always fiercely tracking words in her Irish font dictionary dating from the 1880 or 1890s...Dineen’s think. but the cover was burned off in a kitchen fire.
