Boo! It`s Halloween! ?

These 3 were our first Halloween visitors this evening.

Good evening and Happy Halloween!

Halloween started as an ancient Celtic harvest festival, Samhain when the nights became longer than the days. Winter is coming.

This is how I remember it from growing up in Northern Ireland. All the cubs and cutties (boys and girls less than 10) would start, as the sun went down, by dressing up in our parent’s old clothes. We would use a burnt cork to disguise our faces. Then we would go out to knock on the neighbor’s doors and ask “Any fruit or nuts for Halloween”. You might get some hazelnuts, an apple, pears, or whatever fruit people had in their garden.

Then with our pockets bulging, we would go home for some Halloween party games such as dunking for apples in a basin full of water, or trying to bite an apple hanging from a string with your hands behind your back. Halloween was also the only time we would eat a barmbrack which is like a cross between a fruit cake and fruit bread. There was often a ring baked inside it, and the person who got the ring would be the first to get married. We also would bake a ring, a coin and a piece of cloth into an apple tart. The money meant wealth, and the piece of cloth meant poverty.

Meanwhile, the older teens would be lighting the bonfire made of anything and everything they could scrounge such as old boxes, tyres, furniture, garden rubbish, anything that would burn. Then they would set off their fireworks.

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