There are various meals and extras that we have in Ireland for Halloween...with the most popular being a Halloween Brack which is a tea-bread eaten toasted with lashings of butter...it is the tradition to put a ring inside...a gold one of course...the person who finds it will be married during the coming year.
But at one time the Brack also contained a pea, a piece of cloth. a small stick and a coin. The person who found the pea would remain unmarried...the cloth would be poor...the stick would be a fighter and should you be lucky enough to have the coin in your slice then you'd be rich!
Bakeries still put a gold ring in the Bracks...wrapped up in a bit of paper so you can see it before you inadvertently swallow it...not real gold of course...that'd be a bit silly.
Then there is Colcannon...which is well mashed potatoes and finely chopped scallions ( spring onions) piled up in a heap on your plate with a depression in the middle which you fill with butter...
The main meal is still bacon and cabbage...and that might sound awful actually but you don't boil the cabbage with the bacon...the joint of bacon is cooked...then laid on top of freshly cooked cabbage...served with plain boiled potatoes in their jackets.
Carving a face into a Pumpkin is relatively new...the Irish always used to use a turnip...which isn't a turnip at all but a swede...we call turnips a turnip and swedes are turnips...it's simple really!
Most of the older traditions like bobbing for apples have long gone now...and children don't make their own Halloween costumes anymore...they come from a shop and are more gory and horrible every year!
Do you have any Halloween traditions which you still carry on with today?
Az made me cabbage and bacon last week, never had it before, it was delicious, certainly want it again. I love Colcannon, he has made that for me a few times, love that too. We have decorated our front window and our front door for Halloween. Getting Pumpkins to carve, for the front step tomorrow, my cauldron is full of treats, in case we get any knockers trick or treating.
I remember bobbing for apples with my kids, and making their costumes with them. Telling ghost stories. The nights fun used to end with 'murder in the dark' a game played with the electric lights turned out and curtains pulled, everyone had a torch to flash on under their chin, and a rolled up newspaper to whack the other players with as they shouted "murder in the dark" ! LOL it was a lot of fun, and I hope they will do the same with their kids.
We used to put tanners and thrupenny bits in the Christmas pud, trouble is I can't stand Christmas pud yeeeuck!!! So I always went to bed stony broke.
AZ
I'm a nightmare at Christmas. I don't eat Chrismas pud, or the meat or the stuffing! I don't do halloween either as I find it too frightening x
Now that we no longer have children in the house, I'm afraid all our Halloween customs have lapsed. I still love to have a pumpkin though and to get out in the woods for a walk full of Halloween coloured leaves. Buying sweets to give out for trick or treat still happens and I make sure to keep the cats in. And I love to watch a scary movie on TV or DVD at Halloween.
BTW, we had bacon and cabbage tonight for the first time in yonks. It was divine !
All the old things have gone the kids don't wont sweets all they want is money and like you said the parents take the kids to the shop and buy the costumes we used to make ours
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