What do you think of Halloween? Love it or loathe it, there's no denying it has become an increasingly popular event in Australia each October 31. This year trick-or-treating might be a problem because of coronavirus, but it's not hard to see the appeal for children of spooky costumes and celebrations and asking for lollies with a "Trick or treat".
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While some see it as an unwelcome American cultural import, an annual nuisance and utterly commercial, there's a long and fascinating history behind Halloween.
Dr Michael Barbezat, 39, is a Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University (ACU). The American-born academic remembered trick-or-treating from his childhood days in Chicago.
He went around the neighbourhood with his friends and his parents "from when I could walk" until he was about 12.
When met with the traditional "Trick or treat", people put something in his proffered pumpkin. Dr Barbazet said if they didn't, he wouldn't have known what to do: toilet-papering a house was something a well-brought-up Protestant boy might do to prank a friend, but not a stranger.
In response to urban legends about razor blades being inserted into apples and poison into lollies, the police set up mobile X-rays to screen the treats.
"They're weird conspiracy stories - something might have happened once."
Back then, he didn't worry: it was all about dressing up as He-Man or a ghost and collecting candy.
In more recent years Dr Barbezat has been exploring the origins of Halloween, among other research.
Dr Barbezat said Halloween goes back hundreds of years and has incorporated both Christian and non-Christian elements. Much of its history is cloudy because of inadequate and sometimes hostile documentation, since the educated who wrote about events were frequently indifferent to or against the practices of the common folk.
He also said that because of this lack of clarity scholars often disagree on details.
October 31 was Samhain in the Celtic religion, marking the end of the harvest season. It may have been adopted and altered by the Western Christian churches that used Latin and was known by different names including All-Hallows Eve and Halloween, meaning Saints' Evening. November 1 was All Saints Day or the Feast of the Saints, when all the saints were celebrated, and November 2 was All Souls Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, when the souls of the dead were remembered and activities, including charitable giving and the commissioning of masses, were undertaken to provide respite for souls in purgatory.
Halloween, he said, was a time when the boundaries between the living and the dead became looser , "causing a gap where there was shifting across from the dead to the living".
The modern white-sheeted ghost was, he said, "the remnant of a much more serious attitude to communing with the dead. Ghosts in Medieval Europe were an important presence, some were even 'consulted' by scholars on the religious and political debates of the day".
In folklore, Jack O'Lantern was a manifestation of the mysterious balls of light known by various names including will o' the wisp and in outback Australia, the Min Min lights. One explanation for the name Jack O'Lantern was the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, an evil drunkard condemned to walk the planes between good and evil for eternity with an ember inside a root vegetable to light his way.
"We know people tell these stories as a way of explaining things but the absolute truth can't be known by us today," Dr Barbazet said.
Perhaps this mystery is part of the ongoing allure of Halloween. The spiritual elements might have become more distant than, say, for Christmas, and the seasonal links it has in the northern hemisphere aren't here, but it's certainly not just about sweets and spooks.