It’s Fall, Y’all will be taking a look at autumn traditions from around the world in our monthly “Falling for Tradition” piece. Please enjoy our first installation while drinking a mug of hot cocoa with mini marshmallows.
In the United States, the autumn season is marked by the resurgence of hoodies, pumpkins placed on front stoops and the return of children and teens to school.
While there are some small federal holidays throughout fall, like Columbus or Indigenous Peoples Day, the main holidays are Halloween and Thanksgiving.
However, in other parts of the world, autumn is celebrated differently, often honored with traditions that evolved from the original farming cultures in the area mixed with more modern customs.
One such country is Ireland.
Holiday: Samhain Traditions: Bonfires, jack-o-lanterns, dressing up in costumes Month: Late October into early November
Any public school student who was assigned Halloween history books in primary school knows that trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns originate from Celtic and Gaelic traditions within the United Kingdom, namely from Ireland.
Originally a pre-Christian holiday, Halloween descends from the Celtic and even pre-Celtic holiday of Samhain — pronounced sah-win — before being melded with the Christian holidays of All Saints Day, also called All Hallows, and All Souls Day.
The Festival of Samhain was the Celtic new year, marking the end of the warm season and the start of the cold one. This was also the night where the veil between worlds was the thinnest, so spirits and the fae were thought to be able to cross over into the human realm.
It was characterized by a huge bonfire that had origins in a fertility ritual, but came to be associated with many other traditions and purposes. The bonfire was also thought to scare away the evil spirits and goblins that would walk the Earth that night.
People would extinguish the fires in their fireplaces at home and reignite them with embers from the mass bonfire from the Great Fire Festival. These embers would sometimes be carried in hollowed out turnips.
This is not quite the origin of the jack-o-lantern, though. That tradition comes from a Celtic story — one that, once again, any good public school student should know — about a bad man named Jack.
Jack made a deal with the devil while sitting with him at a bar to give up his soul in exchange for enough money to buy a drink. They shook on it, and Satan turned himself into a coin. Once Jack paid for the drink however, he stole the coin back and kept it in his pocket.
He told Satan he would let him out as long as he agreed not to take his soul. The devil agreed and Jack freed him.
Years later, when Jack died, he was unsurprisingly denied entry to Heaven. He was also, though, denied entry to Hell. Instead, he was doomed to walk the netherworld for all eternity. Jack asked Satan if he could have a light, as it is dark between worlds, and the devil gave him an ember.
Jack then hollowed out a turnip and put the ember inside. The Celts believed that on Samhain, Jack wandered around, and they began putting carved turnips with fire inside outside their homes to guide his evil spirit away from their families and to keep him moving.
Once Irish immigrants made their way to America, they found that pumpkins were much easier to carve and thus was born our tradition of carving pumpkins for Halloween.
Additionally, Celtic people began dressing up as ghouls and goblins on Samhain to trick the evil spirits that they passed by into thinking they too were spirits. This is where our tradition of dressing up comes from.
Not all Irish customs made their way into American culture, though, such as the celebration of cutting the last sheaf, a farming tradition in which the community would celebrate the end of the harvest.
Holiday: End of the grain harvest Tradition: Celebratory cutting of the last sheaf of grain Month: Late September or early-to-mid October
The crop of choice in Ireland at this point in the year was wheat and grain, which they called corn, not to be confused with American maize. A sheaf is a bundle of grain tied together.
At the conclusion of the harvest, generally sometime in October, there would only be one sheaf left in the fields. This last sheaf came to be called the Cailleach, which meant crone or hag in Gaelic tradition.
The Cailleach Beara was said to be an old hag who occasionally had periods of youth. She was associated with the cold weather, wildlife and grain, in addition to children — she supposedly fostered 50 kids during her lifetime.
As she was associated with grain harvest, the last sheaf became called the Cailleach, among other things, and eventually people came to believe that that final bundle of grain was Cailleach Beara herself.
At the point in the harvest where there was just one sheaf standing in the field, the farmers would shape it into a woman-like figure. The farm laborers would stand about ten yards away and throw their hooked tools at the sheaf, trying to knock it down. Whoever made the Cailleach fall won the contest.
“Once the sheaf was felled it was brought triumphantly to the farmer’s wife and hung about her neck, the successful labourer would often take credit for removing misfortune from the mistress and her household, the labourer was generally rewarded for their skill with the first drink, a shilling, or some other small but significant prize,” The Fading Year explained. “A feast was often provided by the farmer to celebrate the end of harvest, with all involved in the work drinking and dancing through the night.”
After the celebration was done, the sheaf would be hung somewhere in the farmhouse, most commonly in the kitchen, where it would live until the end of the next harvest, when it was relegated to the cowshed to make room for the new Cailleach.
This tradition was practiced in different variations all throughout Ireland and Scotland, but seemed to have been most prominent in the northern region of Ireland among Catholics and Protestants. People continued cutting the last sheaf like this until sometime last century.