There used to be a gulf between Halloween and Christmas. To little me, it felt like months and months and waiting through the dark and rainy days of November and early December. The Tiny Tears ads weren’t on the telly until a month before the big day and it was almost a competition to see who’d be the first to spot the little blond toddler sneaking a cornflake from Santa’s bowl in the Kellogg’s commercial.
Now, I’m bracing myself to hear the Denny child proclaiming “he’s a werry dud Santy” any moment. Halloween and Christmas have merged into a mega holiday of sorts with October 31st as the spooky starter and December 25th as the gargantuan main course. The bit in-between is an amuse bouche of trying to hide the Smyths toy catalogue from the children and wondering how early is too early to start untangling the outdoor lights.
We haven’t even hit Halloween yet and the selection boxes have been in the supermarkets since August. Last week I reluctantly ordered my Christmas tree because the company has me in a steely grip of a 15 per cent discount for early adopters. I won’t be decorating it until December 8th though. I’m not a complete animal. The phrase “it gets earlier every year” has lost all meaning because we’ve stopped being scandalised about how early “it” gets, although it does feel scandalous to be faced with a festive yard of Jaffa Cakes in Tesco when I still have sandals on my feet and to be bracing for the first Christmas ads when I don’t even know everyone’s names on The Great British Bake Off yet.
My memories of Halloween consist of hacking at a turnip with my mother’s good potato peeling knife and enjoying the one week of the year when brazil nuts entered the Irish diet
I used to worry that this melding of the last three months of the year into Hallochristmas would take away the festive magic. What if it turned into a year-round buffet of Good Biscuits and decorated trees became part of the furniture? What if we lost the ability to feel wonder at the sight of a box of crisps? The day a box of crisps becomes mundane is the day we’ve lost our humanity.
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Like it or not, we’re being carried along on this tsunami of Halloween and Christmas fever and actually, it’s not so bad. Halloween becomes more demented year on year. Houses have already been decorated for weeks and the tenacious youths in my locality started collecting wooden pallets for the bonfire in July. Children wheel out their costumes across multiple events in school and at home. Pumpkin patches have sprung up anywhere there are desperate parents willing to pay to do some glorified gardening and keep the kids quiet for an hour or two. Halloween decor is now a thing with candles, decorative gourds and ghostie throws for the couch.
At the eternal risk of invoking “I remember when all this was fields”, my memories of Halloween consist of hacking at a turnip with my mother’s good potato peeling knife and enjoying the one week of the year when brazil nuts entered the Irish diet. They were contained within their own titanium-esque shell but that was nothing a hammer couldn’t fix. As a child I was told that All Hallows Eve was the time when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest and I spent at least four Halloweens living in dread that a ghost with clanking chains was going to come and claim me, or at the very least a banshee would peep in a window at me. Halloween lasted a week, tops and then there was that great chasm before Christmas.
When Halloween night passes next week, I fully expect to pitch straight into Christmas mode, and I’m not overly bothered by it. We are at a precarious precipice of some Irish influencer deciding they’re going to celebrate Thanksgiving, brainwashed by watching TikToks of Americans making marshmallow casseroles. We managed to keep the gender reveals largely at bay thus far; we can mount the same stand against Thanksgiving. Leaping straight from Halloween into Christmas can but strengthen our resolve against turkey pardoning and the holiday’s problematic and bloody history. Although many of us continue to celebrate Christmas despite its own problematic past and associations, so it would be hypocritical to criticise Americans for doing the same.
Those who find Christmas a trying time either financially and emotionally or both must find its creeping spread difficult, and I empathise. Some years are more difficult than others. I think I might lean into it this time round. I have the tree ordered after all.