But I’m not so keen on a whole pumpkin bored out with eyes and holes in it, even worse with a light inside. I find it unsettling, as a dog does with something out of the ordinary.
And if I find it unsettling, New Boy is likely to go berserk. He will rapidly descend into a bout of unrelenting barking if a pigeon whirs off or the wind blows leaves in from the east. The other day, he went off his tree when the missus pointed her old long camera lens at him to take a photo.
Anyway, it’s the season for that sort of stuff, apparently — pumpkins behaving oddly, spider webs sprayed everywhere and small people with masks on. It’s an American thing we’ve inherited, like young men with baseball caps worn backwards.
The Boss says it was first a big thing for the Irish, and waves of Irish immigrants brought Halloween to the United States after the Potato Famine. And over the past 10 years, an unnerving number of Australians have picked it up for reasons completely beyond we dogs.
That’s because a couple of thousand years back, the early Druids — the Celtic priests — used to burn dogs and other animals on enormous bonfires as a sacrifice to the Celtic deities on October 31 each year.
Back then, they believed the new year started on November 1. It was the end of the harvest and the beginning of the dark, miserable winter — a time often associated with human death.
The dogs would have managed the transition to winter quite well if left to their own devices, but they had to clear out lest they be burned. Anyway, the Celts believed that the line between the living and the dead became fuzzy at this time of year, when the ghosts of the dead could easily arrive unannounced.
The idea of having ghosts lurking around apparently empowered the Druids to make predictions, and these forecasts — they must have been largely on the cheerful side — gave the Celts some comfort to endure the winter. Fortified, and with the scent of burning dog fur in their nostrils, they danced around in animal heads and skins and frightened every dog not already burned.
After the Romans rolled into the British Isles in their chariots, the Christian religion gradually spread. Around AD 609, Pope Boniface IV established the Catholic feast of All Martyrs’ Day, which Pope Gregory II later moved to November 1 and expanded to include all the existing saints.
This was All Saints’ Day, which was called All Hallows, or All Hallowmas, in Middle English. Thus, the night before — that traditional night to dress up in animal skins and set about burning my ancestors — was called All Hallows’ Eve and ultimately shortened to Halloween.
When Henry VIII embraced Protestantism, this festival — now a mix of its pagan roots and Catholicism — was frowned upon, so it was left to the Irish and other Europeans; when they arrived in the US, the customs of the immigrants mixed with those of the American Indians and Halloween evolved into a habit of telling ghost stories and general mischief making — although I’m pleased to say the dogs were finally able to relax.
Along the way, goblins, fairies, elves, gnomes and funny pumpkins joined the fray while young folk learned to trick-or-treat as a way of filling up with sweet stuff. I don’t need it, and they’d better not wander on to my river with a spooky pumpkin. Woof!
