Halloween: the Festival That Dares Not Speak Its Name
What does BBC Radio 4’s long-running, much-loved soap opera about Everyday Farming Folk have against Hallowe’en?
The Archers began on 1st January 1951, as a 15-minute daily serial intended to spread the word about new developments in farming. It centred on 3 or 4 farming families, most of whom were called Archer, with the addition of the Aldridges at the posh end of the scale, balanced by the Grundys and Horrobins at the other. The characters took off, and a wealth of other storylines got woven in, some for comic effect, some for their gripping dramatic pull, but most as vehicles for messages about Good Social Behaviour. No one is ever racist, for instance, except in a clumsy way, because unless one of the villagers says something objectionable (and, needless to say, quite out of character), how are we, the listeners, to grasp that a newcomer to the Ambridge village is from an ethnic minority?
I say, if those were the reasons, I could understand it. I’d be with the scriptwriters like a shot (can you tell?) in their stalwart resistance to a festival that in its current form is a purely American, not English, tradition. After all, they don’t hold huge firework displays on Guy Fawkes’ Day over the pond, so why should we adopt Trick or Treat over here?
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| BBC Radio 4's The Archers |
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| Halloween pumpkins... at least they're not plastic. Photo by Toni Cuenca: https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-jack-o-lanterns-619424/ |
But I digress. And bore all those who know this already.
Back to Hallowe’en, then, a festival of which I am not fond. If characters on The Archers were allowed to be unenthusiastic because of the explosion of tacky plastic pumpkins, skeletons, spiders, webs, glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth, bats intended to adhere to windows but end up flopping stickily on to the floor, highly flammable costumes for tiny tots, the ghastly orange-and-brown colour scheme in all the shop windows and all children’s clothes and the mountains of tooth-rotting sweets poured on children by adults who should know better…
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| Mountains of tooth-rotting sweets. Photo by Polina Tankilevitch: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-candy-5469042/ |
I say, if those were the reasons, I could understand it. I’d be with the scriptwriters like a shot (can you tell?) in their stalwart resistance to a festival that in its current form is a purely American, not English, tradition. After all, they don’t hold huge firework displays on Guy Fawkes’ Day over the pond, so why should we adopt Trick or Treat over here?
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| Trick or Treat; not an English tradition. Photo by Charles Parker: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/kids-wearing-halloween-costumes-doing-trick-or-treat-5859601/ |
(You can imagine how popular I was with my children when they were growing up. Luckily they just learnt to have sleepovers with their friends every 31 October, whose much nicer mummies used to let them go Trick or Treating.)
But the PTA of Xander’s primary school (back to The Archers now, do keep up) organising a children’s party for the occasion have no problem with any of the above.
No, it’s the name of the festival they object to. Adam, Xander’s father, gets into trouble for ordering bunting with the word Halloween on it. Everyone has to call it a Spooky party, not a Halloween party, ‘because of the way some parents feel about that word.’
What on earth do they mean? What’s wrong with the old English word for All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints Day, the day before the Feast of All Souls? The objection can’t be religious; the idea of evil spirits having a final fling before being overcome and neutralised by God’s overwhelming goodness is deeply entrenched in the Christian tradition. Superstition, then? But if ghosts and ghoulies and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night frighten you, why celebrate it at all? Just don’t have a Hallowe’en party. Don’t have an extremely boring plotline about it, or if you must, at least reveal what the problem is.
But we’re never told.
Clearly someone in The Archers’ scriptwriting team feels strongly – otherwise why mention it? – but prefers just to cancel an ancient word rather than explain why. As if you can hide the meaning of things simply by changing the language, which everyone knows isn’t possible.
Cancelling. Changing what language means. Oh wait…
Happy Hallowe'en, all!
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Comments
My own recent experience, as we have just been visiting, is that my grandson (now twelve) has no interest whatsoever in the event, whereas my granddaughter received a package of vampire teeth while we were there and was wearing them and grinning around at us during a babysitting stint. She also had a black and floaty costume which made me think of Queen Mab. When I was their age it was all bob-apple and duck-apple, and maybe chestnuts heated on an open fire if we were lucky.
How times have changed, and whatever we call it and how we celebrate the event.
Xander, by the way, is the son of Adam (a rather boring farmer) and Ian (an endearing and gifted northern Irish chef), obtained through surrogacy from an Eastern European friend who spent time in Ambridge some years ago. No one can say the Archers doesn’t move with the times…