Dookin’ for apples and catching treacly scones

Hold breath: face into water. Teeth grasping for a floating apple. No hands are allowed. Eventual success. Face dried. Then move on to the next game which also depends on good teethwork and no hands. But this time it’s a scone, coated in treacle, hanging from the ceiling. Not as easy as the apple, it’s a lot more messy as blobs of black treacle drip relentlessly onto upturned face.

Of course it’s Halloween. And everyone is having a fun night of spooky merriment as summer fades into winter and old rites and customs of guising and symbolic sun-worshipping bonfires surface once again. They are a link back to the days before the first Christian missionaries arrived in 300AD and superstitious nature-lovers were converted to Christianity which superimposed many of its religious trappings on their old traditions. The name for the old Celtic New Year, ‘Samhuinn’ meaning summer’s end was changed to All Hallows Eve (Halloween). The Norse Yule was changed into a mass for Christ’s birthday. Yet despite the changes, the old rites of myth, magic, superstition and folklore carried on. Which is where the apple and the treacle scone, and everything else related to Halloween, comes from.