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5. Trick Or Treat Pre-Texts and Contexts

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5. Trick Or Treat Pre-Texts and Contexts Trickor Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts 83 Victorian survey of Irish calendar customs mentions divination games and apple bobbing as Halloween pastimes, but says nothing about food collec­ tion or a procession of"spirits." Muck Olla enters therecord only in 1902, in Wood-Martin'sTraces of the Elder Faithin Ireland. Therewe findthat the Druidicdeity is confinedto countyCork andthat his agent inthe masked pro­ cession wears a horse's head-making himlook suspiciously like the British hodeninghorse or its Welshvariant, the MariLwyd . On the practiceof masked 5. Trick or Treat beggingat the Celtic New Year, authoritieson theDruids do not saya word.2 A second reason to question the Sanihain link is, to use art historical Pre-Texts and Contexts jargon, the discontinuity in the custom's provenance. "If the'pre-Christian religiousceremo ny' theoryof originof calendarcustoms is correct," observes E. C. Cawte,"then ideally there would be records of them at all periods since pre-Christian times. On the whole, such records do not exist." Cawte is TAD TULEJA speakingof Britishanimal disgnise,but thecomment applieswell to trick or treat.As Santinosagely observes,the road fromthe sagas to today's masked children"is a long one, withmany intersections and forksand sideroads and curves"; takingit straightis to play Procrnsteswith the record. Maybenine­ Majority opinion on the origins as _ of trick or treat h it as a relic of teenth-century immigrants did bring costumed begging with them, but the CelticNe w Year. The ancient Celts believed that at Samhainthe irits Americansources do not makethat case. Indeed, trickor treat does not be­ of the dead returned to visit the living. To welcome them-and to p:tect come a widespread featureof theAm ericanHalloween until a century after themselves from supernatural mischief-people unbolted their the Gr�e. By that time, traces of the elder faith are faint, and the hearth doors kept fires b · dummg, an set out gifts of food 3 _ _ as propitiation. Later, accord- United States is filledwith more than Irish immigrants. mg to a commonly crtedexplanation, as _ they dressed spirits themselves, us­ If Druidism provided theonly model for trick or treat, one might for­ mg nunnery as a magical defense and demanding contributions from their give thisspotty record, fautede mieux. In fact,what ThomasVennum nicely neighbors for communal feasts. Some suggest that these collections calls"masked ritual solicitation"appears throughout the world, and the Brit­ ade m the were name of the Druidic deity Muck a; : Oll others that they were a ish Isles and Ireland themselves provide several examples of harvest-time !. orm of mummmg. Whatever the wrinkles, the root assumption is beggingto rival hoarySamhain' s claim as single source. I begin this chapter trickor the same: treathad its beginnings in theCeltic dawn. 1 by examiningthese othersources.' At first glance this neo-survivalist interpretation seems eminently rea- sonable. Not only do the demonstrable n . links betwee Halloween an d A Cornucopia of Precedents Saniham1m,te comparison on as a point-by-point b is, but, because Hallow­ een only took hold in America after the arrival of Irish immigrants in th If Samhain provides themost popularchoice fora prototypicaltrick or treat, 1840s it seems rightto assume '. theypacked their ancient customs into steer� it is certainlynot theonly one. Etlmographerscite several examples of ritual age with them and transplantedthem, one by one, on New be among nati ericans,and even if we confineourselves toWest­ fortrmately, there World soil. un­ � � is a paucity of primervevidence . -; to support thisre adin g. em Europe, fromwhose customs the American ritualmight reasonably be Ins h sources do mention the tradition of food for the dead d J k thoughtto haveevolved, we arenot short of plausible candidates.The schol­ Santino has suggested ingeniously that the saga hero N era may b� :'mo:] arly literature,up to now, has focusedon three: the All Souls' Daytradition forour door-to-door beggars; but costu� beggingdoes known as soul caking, the masked beggingof Guy Fawkes Day, and peasant r iti not figure in here, and p op atory food is hardly 5 unique to the Emerald Isle. An exhaustive collectionstaken up for Saint Columba. .
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