Welcome Great Turnip
Well, New York, there’s a chill in the air (every other day) and a gourd on every stoop, which can only mean one thing: Halloween is upon us. Soon, the famed parade will descend upon 6th Avenue, honoring our community by dividing NYU into warring east and west factions. (Speaking from experience, you are stuck where you are for the night, brother.) The bars will brim with Monster-Mashing teens, and per the prophecy, a wealthy child in disguise will knock on your door to beg for chocolate. The innocent adage they’ll yell from behind their Paw Patrol mask has evolved into a throwaway Halloween greeting, but not too long ago was used as more of a literal threat. “Trick? Or treat?” As in “are you gonna feed me, or am I gonna have to egg your house?”
A bit of Halloween history courtesy of my Irish Studies minor, which I am now about to on-the-record use for work in real life: it started as Samhain (Gaelic for “November”), the Celtic festival marking the harvest’s end, when as the seasons faded from “light” to “dark,” spirits of the dead could cross over into the realm of the living. Even the lamest of British invaders could get down with the festivities, but bugged by the holiday’s lowkey paganism, decided the spirits in question were now conveniently saints.
Samhain traditions carried on despite the weird Catholic intrusion (stop trying to make “All Saints Day” happen), and some made it through Ellis Island. The Irish and Scottish taught us the folktale of “Stingy Jack” (iconic), a man barred from both Heaven and Hell, doomed to roam the Earth forever with only a “jack o’lantern,” aka a burning coal inside a turnip (pumpkins were cheaper). They told us how their kids would go door to door in costume, offering songs or prayers for the dead in exchange for “soul cakes” (?), apples (still rollin’ in the harvest), nuts (famously a hit with children), or a mother-effin’ beer.
So that’s how the children of New York started trick-or-treating, right? I wish! Cute that you thought it would make sense. We already had our own thing, which was, of course, “Ragamuffin Day.” But it was at least on Halloween, right? You idiot! Thanksgiving.
The dress code for Ragamuffin Day was indistinguishable from the one for the all-11-year-old-girls production of Guys And Dolls I once starred in: your dad’s suit and a fuck ass hat. For one Purge-style afternoon each year, the otherwise-employed first graders of the five boroughs got to have some good old-fashioned 1870s fun, posing as beggars and ambushing strange adults for fruit and cash. Some hit the jackpot by way of a “red penny,” heated on someone’s stove and thrown out the window in an attempt to burn a mini gangster below. “I remember how my fingers got blistered that way,” reminisced a cop to the Times, “but they don’t have any real fun like that anymore.” He then “relapsed into the melancholy mood and wandered off.” (When asked why he believed “all good American institutions” had “gone to pot,” he mused, “Prohibition.” Real af.)
Around the time the Depression hit, the whole “beggar children” thing stopped being funny for some reason, and the Times betrayed that aforementioned cop and declared Ragamuffin Day “annoying” (penny-roasted). The city’s kids were appeased with the opportunity to serve disheveled looks in a “Ragamuffin Parade” for the next few Thanksgivings, until the Macy’s one dragged it under by the sharp lapel of its checkered coat.
Not to worry, by then we’d listened to almost a century’s worth of Irish randos waxing poetic about Stingy Jack, and Halloween became a thing just in time. The sweet, jocund “unaccompanied minors pleading for food” holiday tradition could live on, at the adults’ expense this time. Admittedly, the “trick” half of the equation was pretty much just an American thing—until the early 2000s, Irish kids would ring doorbells chanting “help the Halloween party,” no ultimatum attached. Meanwhile, a 1930s American toddler snubbed of a licorice pipe might soap your windows, smash your pumpkins, and commit arson, all while smoking a real pipe.
As recently as the 80s, violence played a key role in the Big Apple festivities, with police choppers shining floodlights over the city each year in the hopes of capturing vandals alien-abduction-style. An ABC7 Eyewitness News clip from 1984 finds a “roving gang” of mulleted teens with raging Brooklyn accents, wielding cans of shaving cream. When asked what they plan to do with their Barbasol and carton of “extra-lahge grade-A eggs,” they state the obvious: “hit this kid over here.” A “constable on patrol” (thought Shakespeare made those up) follows them for about a block, repeatedly demanding they hand over the ammo. Every time, he’s met with the bulletproof argument “come awn, please?” Sunglasses and flannels aside, these ragamuffins had a lot in common with those a century their senior: even in this concrete jungle wet dream tomato, they had jack shit to do.
And I don’t blame them: a New York Halloween really doesn’t offer much. We don’t have pumpkin patches or hayrides or backyard haunted houses. No hilly suburban neighborhoods to traverse with flashlights like the cast of Stranger Things, no trading Charleston Chews for Fun Dip 30,000 steps deep in the woods. Even the Jekyll & Hyde bar didn’t survive COVID (hey Jerry461 on TripAdvisor, “old musty smell toilets a disgrace food awful” was the point!!). But when it comes to this weird creepy holiday, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. If a coal-stuffed turnip counts, even Stingy Jack got a rock.
All that really matters is the healthy distraction that a little mischief and a sweet treat offer. This Halloweekend, we’ll be having too much fun spraying constables with shaving cream to notice that it’s also Daylight Savings (sorry). Sipping TSLs (as soon as Starbucks can afford turnips), we’ll forget the desolate hibernation that lies ahead. Without the bright bonfires of Samhain, the dark and cold of this time of year would creep in without a fight. And without the Ragamuffins, we’d have no targets for our flaming pennies.
