Hallowe'en & Guising: Neep Lanterns, Dookin' and the Scottish Roots of Trick-or-Treat

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Hallowe'en attracts confident statements about Druids and pagan rites that are rarely sourced. Many heritage websites, including reputable ones, repeat the idea that guisers disguised themselves to hide from wandering spirits. That may be how some people understood the custom, but it is an explanation, not a recorded origin. This card leans on dated written records, Burns's poem, folklore collections and oral-history recordings, and labels the rest.

The name and the date

established "Hallowe'en" is short for All Hallows' Even, the evening before All Hallows' (All Saints') Day on 1 November. The contracted form is Scots, and the apostrophe marks the missing letter. Scots usage, helped along by Burns, gave the English-speaking world its word for the night.

established The date coincides with Samhain (Scottish Gaelic Samhainn), the Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter. Medieval Irish texts describe Samhain gatherings, and Samhain is still the Gaelic name for November.

shared How much of Hallowe'en descends from Samhain is genuinely debated. The popular account, repeated by many heritage bodies, says Hallowe'en simply is Samhain under a Christian name. Historians are more cautious. The idea of Samhain as a "Celtic New Year" when the dead walked was developed largely by nineteenth-century scholars, and the medieval evidence comes mostly from Ireland. Julian Goodare, professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, notes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dressing up and visiting houses in Scotland "mainly happened during the 12 days of Christmas". The fair conclusion is that Hallowe'en sits on an old Gaelic festival date and some of its customs may echo older beliefs, but the modern night is a layered mix of Christian, folk and later commercial traditions, not a pagan rite preserved intact.

Burns and the Hallowe'en of 1785

established The fullest early picture of a Scottish Hallowe'en is Robert Burns's poem "Halloween", written in 1785 and printed in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786. Burns added prose notes explaining each custom to readers who might not know them, which makes the poem a folklore record as well as a comic narrative.

The night he describes belongs mainly to young men and women, and its business is divination: finding out whom you will marry.

• Pulling kale: young people went blindfold into the kale yard and pulled the first stalk they touched. Its size and shape foretold the husband or wife, and the amount of earth on the root foretold the dowry.
• Burning nuts: a couple each put a nut in the fire. If the nuts burned quietly side by side, the match would be happy; if they hissed or jumped apart, it would not.
• Other rituals: eating an apple before a mirror to see the face of the future spouse, winnowing corn, and dipping a sleeve in a stream where three lairds' lands met.

established Many of these rituals were thought to involve risk, since the spirits that might show you your future were not always friendly. That edge of fear is where Burns finds his comedy.

Guising: earning your treat

established The children's side of the night is guising. The word comes from Middle English guise, "to dress up", the same root as "disguise". Children blackened their faces, wore old clothes or masks, and went from door to door. Crucially, they were expected to earn their reward with a song, a poem or a joke. The treats were modest: nuts, apples, an orange, sometimes a few pennies.

established Recordings in the Tobar an Dualchais oral-history archive preserve memories of this. Helen Kidd, recorded in 1982, remembered guising in Balfron in the 1910s and being given nuts, an orange and an apple. Katie Laurenson, recorded in 1961, described Shetland guisers being given meal rather than money. Margaret McDiarmid, recorded in 1964, recalled children in Perthshire doing household chores instead of performing.

established Shetland and the Western Isles had their own versions. Shetland's skeklers wore straw costumes and masks and visited houses at festival times, a custom with a Norse flavour quite different from mainland guising.

established Guisers once performed a play as well as a party piece. The dance historian George S. Emmerson, in A Social History of Scottish Dance (1972), records that the Scottish guisers' play, named Galoshans (his "Goloshen") after its hero and related to the English mummers' play, with a fight, a death and a comic doctor who revives the dead man, belonged to guising at Yule or Hogmanay and only later moved to Hallowe'en. Sir Walter Scott still entertained the guisers at Abbotsford on Christmas Eve. Emmerson, citing the folklorist A. L. Taylor (1958), notes that in one or two places Hallowe'en guisers were still announcing themselves with "It's the Goloshens. Please for wir Halloween." This fits Goodare's point above that Scottish disguising was mainly a midwinter custom. Emmerson also passes on an artist's account from Barra, where boys at Hallowe'en asked him to make false faces from cotton wool, and the women in the first black-house they entered screamed in terror until the masks came off.

shared Older Hallowe'en evidence is mostly about fire and witchcraft rather than guising. The Statistical Account of the 1790s reported a "Hallow Even fire" kindled in Buchan, and in 1596 people accused of witchcraft in Aberdeen were alleged to have danced in a ring round the market and fish crosses at Hallowe'en, led by the devil playing on his instruments. That is a charge made at a witch trial, not evidence of an ordinary custom.

traditional The often-repeated explanation that children disguised themselves to blend in with wandering spirits and avoid harm is a later interpretation. It may reflect how some people understood the custom, but no early source records it as the reason.

Neep lanterns

shared Scottish children carried lanterns made by hollowing out a turnip (a "neep" or "tumshie", in Scotland usually a swede), carving a face and putting a candle inside. Irish children did the same. Firm records date mainly from the nineteenth century; claims that the custom is ancient are unproven. Anyone who has carved one knows the problem: a turnip is hard, heavy and slow to hollow, and a child-sized one gives very little light. One Dundee man who grew up in the 1960s told Atlas Obscura simply, "They weren't very effective."

established In North America the native pumpkin was larger, softer and cheaper, and it replaced the turnip. The first public report of a pumpkin jack-o'-lantern in Canada came from Kingston, Ontario, in 1886.

The games

established Two party games remain closely tied to Scottish Hallowe'en.

• Dookin' for apples: apples float in a basin of water and players try to catch one with their teeth, hands behind their backs. A Scottish variant drops a fork from above the basin. The custom is widespread, and its origins are uncertain; explanations involving witch-ducking or the Roman goddess Pomona are speculation.
• Treacle scones: scones smeared with treacle hang on strings, and players try to eat them without using their hands. The result is mostly treacle on faces.

Nut burning and kale pulling, central in Burns's day, have largely faded.

Hallowe'en food and charms

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929), records the food that went with the night. Burns's poem ends with the company sitting down to supper: "Till butter'd so'ns, wi' fragrant lunt, / Set a' their gabs a-steerin'". Sowens was a smooth, slightly sour pudding made by soaking the inner husks of oats until they fermented and boiling the starchy sediment; the name comes from Gaelic sùghan. McNeill calls buttered sowens a traditional Hallowe'en dish "in which the 'matrimonial ring' was concealed": whoever found the ring would be the next to marry.

established Her calendar of festival foods gives other Hallowe'en dishes that carried charms in the same way: crowdie (a mixture of oatmeal with cream or milk) or "champit tatties" (mashed potatoes), and in her own day a cake. Apples and nuts complete the list, the same apples and nuts used for dooking and for the nut-burning that Burns describes. By the 1963 edition she lists the charms bakers and households used: a ring for marriage, a button for a bachelor, a thimble for a spinster, a coin for wealth, a wishbone for the heart's desire, and a horseshoe for luck.

established In the Highlands, McNeill records the bonnach salainn, or salt bannock: an ordinary oatcake made with a great deal of salt and eaten at Hallowe'en to bring dreams that would foretell the future, usually a future husband or wife. The charm worked only if the eater drank no water and spoke no word after eating it.

traditional McNeill also places a "Hallowmas bannock" among four old Highland quarter cakes, baked for the first days of spring, summer, autumn and winter. The Beltane bannock is well recorded; her scheme of four matching cakes, including one for Samhain, rests more on her own synthesis than on detailed descriptions of each.

established McNeill's evidence also bears on two points made above. She notes that oatcake farls and a slice of the Yule cheese were "commonly given" to children who went guising at Hogmanay, which fits the historians' view that guising was a midwinter custom as well as an autumn one. And by the 1963 edition she describes Hallowe'en cakes in Scottish bakers' windows covered in tangerine icing with chocolate witches, black cats, owls and bats, and others shaped like apples or pumpkins, stating that "orange and black are the Hallowe'en colours". The commercial imagery of Hallowe'en had reached Scottish shops well before the American-style revival of the 1980s.

Across the Atlantic and back

established Scottish and Irish emigrants took Hallowe'en to Canada and the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives Vancouver in 1898 as the first recorded case in North America of children going about in disguise on Hallowe'en.

established The phrase "trick or treat" first appears in print in southern Alberta in November 1927. The historian Nick Rogers identified a report in The Blackie Times of 3 November 1927; a Lethbridge Herald report of 4 November 1927 is also cited as the first recorded use. Either way the phrase is Canadian, from a region with many Scottish settlers. The American version dropped the performance: the child offered a threat ("trick") rather than a song.

established From the 1980s American Hallowe'en, with pumpkins, store-bought costumes and "trick or treat", spread through film, television and retail to Scotland itself. Many Scots still insist on the performance, and children at a Scottish door are often asked, "What's your party piece?"

• The word "Hallowe'en" is Scots: the apostrophe stands for the missing "v" of "even".
• Burns's poem "Halloween" has prose footnotes explaining every custom.
• In Burns's day, the amount of earth on a pulled kale stalk foretold your future spouse's fortune.
• "Trick or treat" was first printed in Alberta, Canada, in 1927.
• Shetland guisers were sometimes paid in meal rather than money.
• A Scottish turnip lantern is usually carved from what the English call a swede.
• Scottish guisers are traditionally expected to perform before they get a treat.
• A ring hidden in a dish of buttered sowens or mashed potatoes foretold who would marry first.
• Some Scottish guisers once performed a folk play, Galoshans, in which a slain hero is brought back to life by a quack doctor; it moved to Hallowe'en from Yule and Hogmanay.
• Highlanders ate a very salty bannock at Hallowe'en, then went to bed without a drink, hoping to dream of their future spouse.

• Myth: Hallowe'en is an unbroken survival of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. It falls on the Samhain date and some customs may echo older beliefs, but the idea of a direct pagan survival is not supported by the evidence. Early modern dressing up and house-visiting in Scotland happened mainly at Christmas and New Year.
• Disputed: that guisers disguised themselves to hide from wandering spirits. This is a later interpretation of the custom. No early source records it as the reason.
• Myth: turnip lanterns are ancient. They are a genuine Scottish and Irish custom, but firm records date mainly from the nineteenth century.
• Myth: Scotland invented trick or treat. The phrase was first recorded in southern Alberta in 1927, though the custom grew from Scottish and Irish guising.
• Disputed: where apple dooking comes from. Its origins are uncertain, and explanations involving witch-ducking or the Roman goddess Pomona are speculation.
• Myth: Burns's Hallowe'en customs were children's games. Most were divination rituals for young adults, such as pulling kale and burning nuts to foretell a future spouse.
• Disputed: McNeill's four Highland quarter cakes. The Beltane bannock is well recorded, but her scheme of four matching cakes, including a Hallowmas bannock, rests more on her own synthesis than on detailed descriptions.