How is Samhain celebrated in Ireland?
Traditionally, Samhain was celebrated with feasting and guising. It was customary to eat certain meals at this time, such as colcannon a mixture of mashed potato, cabbage, and red onion. Another food associated with this festival is fruitcake or bairin breac barmbrack which had items in it that were used for foretelling the future–a pea or rag meant poverty, a bean meant wealth, a religious medal meant the finder may enter a convent or seminary, a ring meant marriage, and a stick meant that the person who received this in their slice of cake would be beaten by the marriage partner. Nowadays, a barmbrack can be bought in the supermarket but doesnt usually contain all of the above-listed items–many cakes only contain a ring. This change in the objects placed into the brack may reflect a change in attitudes; societal norms have changed and the stick that foretells a future of being beaten by a partner may no longer be acceptable in the modern mindset!
One theory on the origins of guising and dressing as ghosts may be in the notion that the dead are returning on this night and the change of appearance may protect the human from being recognized by the returning spirits of the dead. The sense of things being topsy-turvy and inverted may have given rise to people having fun and using an opportunity to change their appearance into something they are not ordinarily. Today, children dress up in various different costumes, some inspired by the latest films, characters from fantasy stories, and other areas of popular culture. Children trick-or-treat in Ireland nowadays but this tradition may have come back to Ireland from America. In pre-modern Ireland, it was known that Samhain was a time when people could play practical jokes and hoaxes, being a liminal time when such activity would be acceptable, but the custom of going door-to-door threatening to play pranks if candy and other treats are not received seems to be a later development. There seem to be many more organized childrens Halloween parties these days and a fear of allowing small children out at night might be a factor in this. Irish society, as with society generally, has changed in major ways since the time of small communities where locals knew each others children and would look out for them, into a very diversified and in many ways more dangerous society where children need to be accompanied by adults thus lessoning the leeway to do tricks on niggardly people who dont deliver the goods!. The private Halloween parties of today tend to move towards fancy dress. We can still see similarities in the games played at Halloween and those of an older time–snap-apple, bobbing for apples, and dares are still very prominent at parties.
In olden-day Ireland, jack-olanterns would be made by hollowing out a turnip or sugar beet and carving bits out to represent facial features and would then be lit from a candle placed in the inside. The dual idea behind this may have been to at once light the way for the souls of the dead ancestors who are returning to visit the human world and to frighten off any supernatural forces that might be about on this night. Today in Ireland, people carve faces on pumpkins, which are again an American import.
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