Traditionally, Halloween is the day when children (And some adults) accumulate enough sugar in their Halloween treats to tide them through to the Christmas season when a new sugar harvest miraculously appears to tide them over to Valentine’s Day. Note to parents: Christmas season gives us a different kind of sugar, usually disguised in the fruit cake which children would not normally eat. To be honest though, the Halloween sugar usually lasts for only about 2 days giving kids a sort of glow. Don’t worry about the glow. It fades until they get back to normal which means consuming Honey Smacks for breakfast. Kellogg’s Honey Smacks® contains an astonishing 55.6 percent sugar. Factoid for today: A one-cup serving of Honey Smacks packs more sugar than 22 sleeves of Hostess Twinkies. Well, we don’t want our kids nodding out during math class, do we? We shouldn’t talk; our sugar comes in the form of a café Cubano which contains at least 66 times the sugar in a Hostess Twinkie, giving us much the same short-lived glow.
But Halloween isn’t only about the candy! It’s a very important holiday beginning with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. Back then, every-day wear of a woolen tunic with a belt, a cloak, and trousers would not usually frighten a ghost but would certainly scare any fashionista today. The wool does not work in our climate. Samhain is a Gaelic word pronounced “sow-win”. That’s right, nothing like the actual word. If you ever had to listen to a thick Gaelic accent, it’s easier to understand after a long night at the local pub.
The Celts held their major celebration at the end of the month of October, pronounced oawcke-touber, to recognize the end of summer. In South Florida we recognize the end of summer by opening our windows for three days in January to let that rare cool breeze flow through. Samhain was celebrated to welcome in the harvest and usher in “the dark half of the year.” Yeah, during those ancient times there was not a lot to celebrate. There were no convenience stores, so, sadly, you had to kill the food you ate, forget about a proper toilet and men didn’t have a DeWALT 20V Max Lithium-Ion Compact Drill Driver for those repairs to a thatched hut.
We could visualize the happy care-free Celts dancing and celebrating around Stonehenge and rejoicing in the fact that they wouldn’t have to drag the multi-ton stones a million or so kilometers anywhere else.
The Celtic holiday morphed into Halloween when people dress up in costumes and go door to door pleading for treats. The question in some people’s mind this Halloween is “Do I use all that frou-frou and spider webbing to produce that award-winning Keith Richards costume? Yes, the founding member of the Rolling Stones is still alive and the focus of medical research into how a person can still function as a human after 57 odd years of drugs, sex and rocking and rolling. Make some minor changes in Johnny Depp’s pirate character Jack Sparrow, and you’ve got the ideal Keith Richards costume for next Halloween.
Technically, sugar is only one of the phenomenal ingredients in Halloween candy. Carnauba wax, which gives the shine to candy corn, gummy bears and big red wax lips is also used as a surface finishing agent in baked foods, mixes, chewing gum, and auto, floor and shoe polishes, so don’t worry about a natural ingredient like sugar!
This article, of course, was a slightly skewed history of Halloween as seen through the sugar-coated eyes of a Halloween veteran. It is a most important day of the year for me because it was the actual date when I met my wife and Soul-Mate Kathleen, who portrayed Zuna, from the planet Uranus, and the only day in her life when the letter ‘Z’ was part of her name. Coincidence or cosmic giggle?