It’s that time of year: even as the pepernoten are stacked in Albert Hein, pumpkin spice starts to appear in Starbuck’s lattes, fake cobwebs and hilarious ghoulish outfits stagger the streets. Halloween is (fake) heritage in action!

We can probably blame the association of Halloween — the name simply refers to the eve(ning) before All Saints’ Day on November 1 — with a festival of dead on the prominent nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist, James Frazer. In his famous Golden Bough (1890) Frazer described the Celtic pre-Christian festival of Samhain as a rather gezellig occasion for the souls of the departed to visit their old homes, and “warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with good cheer”: family ghosts having a nice cup of tea (or a dram of whisky) in a good Dickensian palour!

The bloodthirsty sacrifices or demonic associations of the feast, so successfully marketed by Hollywood and by party-shops, seem to be largely fanciful appropriations of select descriptions and projections of dimly understood and inherently “other” Northern-European pre-Christian past.

In fact, little is known about the Celtic festival marking the transition from autumn to winter. If sacrifices were performed during it, they were likely of cattle: a means to reduce the herd before the lean winter months, and an offering to ensure ongoing fertility. 

No matter! As a holiday “without an official patron”, no part of national or even regional identity narratives, Halloween could easily be appropriated and adapted by communities in search a liminal feast of playful (and political) social inversion: Scottish and Irish immigrants in North America in the 19^th century; and more recently feminists and the LGBTQA community as an occasion to flout presumed gender and sexuality norms, and to reaffirm the values of feminist and gay cultures (see Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford 2002).

It is this agnostic playful creativity of the holiday and its potential for a kind of cathartic inversion and excess, that have facilitated its spread and global popularity, and make it a particular interesting case of adaptive intangible heritage.

Despite attempts to domesticate the unruly celebration with children’s parties, despite vigorous protests by some conservative Christian groups who take seriously its invented “pagan” origins, and despite the consumerist colonialism of Halloween marketing alongside Latin American cultural ecologies of the Dia de los Muertos (November 2), this happily invented tradition remains resistant to authoritative control. Heritage as adaptive, creative, of the people, and … yes … often fake. Sometimes, there’s nothing so serious as a bit of dress up!

Dr. Andrew Irving is assistant professor of Religion and Heritage at our faculty.