Harvest festival celebrations are doubtlessly as old as agriculture itself. The last crops were brought in, livestock slaughtered and stored. Days became shorter, nights longer adding to the gloom and resulting superstition.
Halloween has its roots in the Celtic festival of
Samhain, a harvest festival. During this time it was believed ancestral spirits were able to return to visit their families in this world. Finding it nigh on impossible to stamp out such by medieval times Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved All Saints' Day from May to end the pagan Samhain. The old term for this event was All Hallows' Eve hallow from the Old English
halig, holy (Old English:
Eâllra Halgena aefen). Traditionally, gifts were distributed to the poor on All Saints' Day.
But the old ways of Samhain, under the guise of Halloween, stubbornly prevailed. Surprisingly perhaps, even in Calvinistic Scotland of the late 18
th-century, many a tradition held sway. Beloved poet Robert Burns recorded many of these following his poem on the subject
Halloween. Not a few involve relying on garden produce.
Following a traditional Halloween supper of
sowens, or porridge with butter, the fun might start. Never mind the belief that it was "thought to be the night when Witches, Devils, and other mischief-making beings, are all aboard on their baneful, midnight errands: particularly, those aerial people, the Fairies, are said on that night, to hold a grand Anniversary."
Burning nuts was a favourite charm, the poet tells us. The name of a lad and lass was given to a pair of nuts. These were laid in the fire. If they burned quietly together or jumped away from each other, so would their courtship be.
Bobbing for apples might apple to some; in the Lowlands of Scotland they had another use for the fruit. According to wee Robbie, "Take a candle, and go, alone, to a looking glass: eat an apple before it, and some traditions say you should comb your hair all the time: the face of your conjugal companion,
to be, will be seen in the glass, as if peeping over your shoulder."
The cabbage of Sassenach cuisine is replaced in Scotland by the kale, or
kail, a more distinctly primitive plant of the same family. The family vegetable patch must have suffered on Halloween, if what Burns' account is anything to go by. The first ceremony of the night involved couples, hand in hand, eyes closed, pulling the first kale plant they encountered. "It's being big or little, straight or crooked, is prophetic of the size and shape of the grand object of their Spells--the husband or wife. If any
yird, or earth, stock to the roots, this
tocher, or fortune; and the taste of the
custoc, that is, the heart of the stem, is indicative of the natural temper and disposition."
Nor was that an end to the usefulness of the poor Brassicaceae. The stems, known in local dialect as the
runts, were fastened above the front door. Then, "the Christian names of the people whom chance brings into the house, are, according to the priority of placing the
runts, the names in question." Perhaps in this day and age when kale vegetable plants, roots and all are a garden rarity, the ornamental coloured kale so common at local vendors would be an acceptable substitute. Given Canada's famed Scottish heritage it would be shameful to allow the prophecy of the peasantry in the west of Scotland disappear.
