Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Halloween today is a far cry from the ancient Celtic festival from which the festivities spring from. It taught that, as the Celtic summer wrapped up by the end of October, the dead walked freely and a costume could help the living blend in or to scare away the ghosts and spirits.
Growing up in England during my childhood we always celebrated Guy Fawkes Day on November 5 with a bonfire and fireworks and for weeks before we would collect hedge trimmings, old cardboard boxes and generally anything that you could safely set fire to.
There was also the making of a Guy, finding an old pair of trousers and a shirt from dad, which was then stuffed with scrunched up newspaper to sit atop the blazing heap. However, we never celebrated Halloween.
But, in the last 15 years it has spread fast around the world like a zombie outbreak.
Here in Bahrain, with the absence of fireworks and bonfires, the kids have spent the last few days decorating the house with scarecrows, skeletons, skulls and sinister spiders.
Another exciting ritual is to carve a pumpkin, turning it into a ghostly jack-o-lantern but with all three children now wanting a pumpkin of their own to carve and at an eye-watering amount of BD7 per pumpkin, they may have to choose a nose, or an eye each to carve. Alternatively, I may do a hard sell on pineapple carving, at a quarter of the price.
There is also A’Ali Pottery where you can purchase clay pumpkins and lanterns, get the children to paint them and then re-use them year after year, glowing realistically with a tea light candle inside.
We will be bobbing for apples and eating homemade toffee apples, as it wouldn’t be Halloween without toffee apples. The two younger children have been planning their costumes for months and are waiting in anticipation to go trick-or-treating and then to count the collected candy afterwards.
I normally sit on the porch to hand out the candy and to watch the kaleidoscope of costumes ringing the doorbell. You get the kids that grab a fistful of candy without saying thank you but you also get the ones who spend forever staring into the candy bowl, trying to decide which one to pick, apologising for taking so long.
I will be turning off the porch light at 9pm, as I shall definitely be out of candy by then for the late night stragglers or the teens that keep changing costumes and do the rounds again and again. It will be time to pack the face paint away and sort through what’s left of the kids loot, load the kids up on water as the sugar fix slump kicks-in.
Last year American trick-or-treaters spent $8.4 billion on candy and costumes - Halloween is definitely big business.
