That Time of Year Again... Griselda Heppel admits to being the Halloween Grinch

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That time of year again.
Mwouhahahahaha it’s that time of year again. (Ghostly laugh, in case you didn’t realise. Please be chilled.) Death’s heads and giant spiders’ webs festooning perfectly respectable garden walls, glow-in-the-dark stickers and beetles lighting up ceilings, shops groaning with a sugar fest the Like of Witch No Sane Adult Would Deem Suitable for their Little Darlings, and everywhere, everywhere, orange. Pumpkins, masks, tee shirts, costumes, all in the ghastly colour combination of dayglo orange and midnight black.

Spiders' webs festoon garden walls.
Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/claudiawollesen-887962/
?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image
&utm_content=921039">Claudia</a>from<a href="https://pixabay.com//
?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medim=referral&
utm_campaign=image&utm_content=921039">Pixabay</a>

You may glean from this – and from my odd previous mention of the subject – that I’m not a fan of Halloween. 

When I was young, ooh, I dunno, a couple of centuries ago, Halloween in Britain barely existed. We made toffee apples and played apple bobbing, and my mother did something clever with apple peel, throwing it over my 5 year old shoulder to see the letter shape it made where it fell, which would be my future husband’s initial. (Do you know, I think it was an N. Magic, eh.) 

Bonfire night, or as it used to be called,
Guy Fawkes Day.
But the main excitement came just under a week later on 5th November, Guy Fawkes Night, when we celebrated Parliament’s and the royal family’s narrow escape from the Gunpowder Plot by burning a ‘guy’ made of straw and old clothes on a massive bonfire, amidst a blaze of fireworks. We still have bonfires and fireworks – in fact the season lasts about 6 weeks, much to the misery of poor household pets – but does anyone even mention Guy Fawkes anymore? It’s probably problematic now, like so much else.

It must have annoyed my parents that at the age of 6, I learnt all about Trick or Treat, still completely unknown in the UK. My family had moved to Stuttgart, Germany, at that time a major American army base, meaning it contained a glorious thing called the PX: a US government-subsidised shopping centre for military personnel abroad. For a while British diplomats were allowed to shop there and an exotic world opened up to my family of Crackerjack (the wickedly delicious snack, not the UK TV programme), Hershey bars, hot dogs, weird drinks called Root Beer and Iced Tea, and our favourite of all, Dennis the Menace comics.

Cheerful and chaotic: Dennis the Menace. 
By Al Wiseman/Hank Ketcham -Heritage Auctions,
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org
/w/index.php?curid=174393967

Cheerful, happy-go-lucky, chaotic but enchanting 5 year-old Dennis was a completely different creation from his English namesake I later discovered in The Beano (forever a disappointment after Hank Ketcham’s delightful American version, sorry, Beano fans), and the comics telling his adventures were almost graphic novels.

Not quite so enchanting... Dennis the Menace from The
Beano. By D.C Thomson & Co - carboncartoon.com, Fair
use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57313527
I learnt much about US history through Dennis’s visits to Washington, for instance, also the 4th of July, Thanksgiving and of course… Trick or Treat, in which naturally he and his friends got into all kinds of scrapes. Oh wow. My eyes were opened. This, this! Why weren’t we doing it too? 

Short shrift from my mother. Trick or Treat was an American custom, she explained. We had Penny for the Guy instead. I demurred but had to accept that no one, either German or English, would have a clue what my brothers and I were on about if we turned up at their houses dressed as ghouls, demanding sweets. 

How different it is now. A fun cultural tradition like that can’t be kept within borders. It has leapt the Atlantic and spread across the world. I mean, children, dressing up and endless supplies of sweets… why wouldn’t it? 

Ha, not everywhere. Once a mother myself, I did the classic thing and agreed with my parents. My long-suffering children soon learned to stay overnight with friends on 31st October, whose kinder-hearted parents succumbed to this unBritish tradition. 

Yup, the Halloween Grinch, that’s me.

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