‘Pooky’ Night
As Halloween / Oíche Shamhna is almost upon us, a post or three on the subject of associated customs seems appropriate. So, without further ado…
#1 – Halloween Games:
Though "bobbing for apples" is a pursuit commonly associated with the festival, in our house the usual activity was (as I recall) "Hanging Apple" or "Snap Apple", which went pretty much as follows:
Crab apples are suspended at the end of a long string from the ceiling and with hands ties behind their backs, youngsters chase the swinging apple with their open mouths and the first one to get a grip of it with their teeth is the winner.1
In fact, according to the above source, the game is so prevalent hereabouts that, "in parts of counties Cork and Limerick , [Halloween] is known as snap apple night." I don't ever remember using that expression to describe the night, but the game is certainly indelibly impressed on my memory. After all, a large, hard, swinging apple can leave lumps, bruises, and black eyes that are hard to forget…
An interesting side-note on the importance of the apple in such games is suggested by the (not-especially-reliable) History Channel website:
By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.2
An alternative theory is offered by the good people of celticspirit.org:
At the heart of the Celtic Otherworld grows an apple tree whose fruit has magical properties. Old sagas tell of heroes crossing the western sea to find this wondrous country, known in Ireland as Emhain Abhlach, (Evan Avlach) and in Britain, Avalon. At Samhain, the apple harvest is in, and old hearthside games, such as apple-bobbing, called apple-dookin’ in Scotland, reflect the journey across water to obtain the magic apple.3
A more rewarding activity (at least in financial terms) was the somewhat disgusting practice of "diving for pennies". This basically followed the "bobbing apple" model, with 'pennies' replacing fruit as the objects one attempted to seize between one's teeth. Unlike apples, however, pennies are not particularly prone to 'bobbing', preferring (instead) to adopt a static position on the bottom of the basin.
Thus, capturing the pennies involved immersing one's head completely in water and hoping one could hold one's breath long enough to either emerge with a coin or two, or (at the very least) resurface alive and undrowned. An additional danger, of course, was the risk of hepatitis (or something similar) from the fetid and filthy water itself…but this was a risk we were happy to take in our pursuit of riches.
Now I think of it, perhaps this rather hazardous exercise was meant to be a sobering reminder of the dangers involved in over-zealously pursuing money, or simply a means of forcing young children to face up to their own mortality (appropriate enough for the night in question)!
More tomorrow…
October 30, 2005
