A few weeks ago I was chatting to my six-year-old daughter about emigrants, why they may have moved away and the reasons they might have for returning home for a visit. I explained that it was normal to come back for family occasions such as weddings and funerals and to celebrate big holidays like Christmas. “And Halloween of course,” she added, nodding sagely, before running off to terrorise her little brother.
I can pinpoint exactly when Halloween became as big as Christmas in our house. It was October 19, 2020, the day Micheál Martin announced that the country would be starting six weeks of Level 5 restrictions. “We will not allow our children’s futures to become another victim of this disease,” he said.
With the evenings closing in, everything felt scary and uncertain. My job as a parent was to protect my children from the horrors of the rising daily case numbers, to come up with something to distract them. To distract us all, really. With nowhere to go and nothing but Halloween on the horizon, I decided to throw the kitchen sink at it. We’d decorate the house straight away, eat monkey nuts and carve pumpkins, really lean into our pagan roots. After all, celebrating Samhain is in our blood.
Before Covid, Halloween was little more than a hurdle to get over before it was an acceptable time to start discussing Santa lists. The kids dressed up for the parade in school and bobbed for apples before going trick-or-treating, but that was about it. One evening of fun to mark the mid-term break. When my husband was dragging our three enormous boxes of decorations down from the attic, I couldn’t help but think back fondly to those simpler times. Times when we played the Monster Mash only once, and that was on October 31.
Thanks to my past self, our house now looks like a crime scene, and has done for the entire month. Outside there are cobwebs and bats and body parts sticking out of the hedge. Our front windows are covered with signs warning that the place is haunted and/or under a zombie attack and to get out immediately. Inside there are pumpkins everywhere. Ceramic, plastic, glass, knitted, organic — name a material, I have a pumpkin in it. The mantelpiece is strung with eyeball lights. There is ghoulish bunting and bloody handprints all over my kitchen. On the stairs, a giant animatronic spider lights up and starts moving every time you walk past it. The doorbell is set to play a spooky tune. We have a projector in the garden that cycles through gruesome scene after gruesome scene, displaying them on the back wall above the foam headstones and zombie hands protruding through the ferns. In case you’re wondering, yes, I do sometimes question my decision to do all this to protect the kids from real life.
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But the more I think about it, the more I think my daughter has a point. From a parenting perspective, Halloween might even be the superior holiday. Unlike Christmas, which comes with a huge price tag and lots of pressure to ensure everyone’s memories are magical, Halloween is pretty low stakes. There’s no long build-up, no endless lists, no markets and concerts and queuing at the post office and cracked matching jumpers and must-do experiences. We get a bank holiday but the kids are off school for only one week. Halloween movies are plentiful and just as good as their Christmassy counterparts. Nobody is required to dedicate days and hours to baking and cooking and shopping and wrapping presents. There are jellies and sparklers and fireworks. Brack, if that’s your thing. It might just be perfect. Although given the opportunity, I think I’d rather live in Santa’s grotto than where I am now: Satan’s.
