We were in Dublin for half-term and spent the week enjoying the gradual agglomeration of Halloween decorations we saw encroaching on my in-laws’ house. The night we arrived, two full weeks before Halloween, there were already a few pumpkins scattered around the neighbourhood, more than a few comically oversized spiders crawling up outside walls and at least one bafflingly involved grave site in a nearby front garden, replete with mossy tombstone and skeletal remains captured in a state of mid-escape. As the days went by, we watched as cobwebs, ghosts and other units of frightful drear enveloped the houses around us – a process I believe scientists call ‘enspookification’.
Our kids were, to put it mildly, in their element. We’ve been seasoning them in scares for the past month and have watched as their taste for the macabre has grown exponentially. Our two-year-old daughter has been chanting the refrain ‘This is Halloween’ from The Nightmare Before Christmas, on a constant loop since 1 October. Our son, meanwhile, has taken to drawing ghouls and spiders on any scrap of paper available and offering detailed plans for his Halloween costume: a creeper zombie from Minecraft, complete with a blocky light-up torch we bought for £10.
Arriving, therefore, in a Dublin suburb experiencing waves of increasing Halloween fundamentalism, has only cemented the importance of this season in their minds. Coming to Ireland from England during this season always reminds me that the two cultures celebrate this holiday differently. The English, a fearful and wimpish race, seem reluctant to daub their homes with terrifying baubles, or spend the requisite time and money necessary to transform their three-bed semis into needlessly extravagant houses of torture. They are, one supposes, simply too scared to countenance the filth-mired hand of death that awaits us all, or perhaps the effect that turning your home into a roadside attraction may have on house prices. The Irish, by contrast, face an entirely opposite social pressure: to refuse to engage with Halloween, up to an including erecting bafflingly detailed death dioramas in your front yard, marks you out as a deeply unserious, and quite possibly sinister, figure, liable to get chased from your home by a mob wielding inflatable pitch forks – my son bringing up the rear with his light-up plastic torch.
There are, of course, levels. As impressive as my kids found Dublin, those efforts are positively puritan when compared to those undertaken by my hometown of Derry, where the biggest Halloween festival on Earth takes place each year. I tell my son stories of my own childhood, when every adult dressed up, even teachers, even nuns! Once I’ve abandoned trying to explain what a nun is, I tell him of Halloweens spent amid crowds of a hundred thousand people dressed as witches and power rangers and slices of pizza, all seeking frights in the frigid cold.
‘Will it still be Halloween when we get back to London?’ he asked tentatively, his foot idly displacing a plastic skull from our path as we walked to the shops. I consider the cost and effort it would take to deck out our own home in the manner I’ve just lionised, rather than going for some glow-in-the-dark ghost window stickers and a candle-lit pumpkin, as usual.
‘Yes, and no,’ I tell him.
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