Colcannon and Hallowe’en in Ireland

Halloween is an important holiday in Ireland. Learn about the traditional ways of celebrating this Irish holiday. Including a traditional recipe for colcannon (kale mashed potatoes).

Halloween marks the halfway point between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. It is a celebration to mark the end of harvest and the beginning of the winter season.

Historically, the Irish were really into celebrating solar events and they built all sorts of monuments dedicated to the movements of the sun. For example, the Mound of Hostages is an 8000-year-old passage tomb with a central passage that was designed to illuminate for the sunrise on Halloween (and its springtime equivalent, February 1, which was also an important Gaelic Holiday).

Traditional Irish Hallowe’en Celebrations

Here’s what I learned about the Irish roots of Hallowe’en from my friends in Ireland. I haven’t double-checked any of these facts, so this is by word of mouth alone.

All of my Irish friends grew up trick-or-treating as children. Well everyone that is, except for my friend Sinead, who grew up in Belfast in the 1970s. As she put it, they had more than enough fireworks without Halloween.

Other traditions included dressing up in homemade costumes and carving Jack O’Lanterns. However, none of my Irish friends had ever carved a pumpkin until that tradition was imported from America in the 1990s.

While that might seem like a pretty big contradiction, it’s easily explained. Jack O’Lanterns weren’t traditionally carved from a pumpkin!

Jack O’Lantern was a headless ghost, who wandered around in the night with a really large turnip for a head. And back in the 1970s and 80s, everyone carved turnips, which apparently was very hard to do and many spoons would be ruined by the effort.

History aside, Halloween is still a really big deal in Ireland. It is a bank holiday for all workers. All of the schools, from preschools right up to Universities, are closed for the whole week, which means that fireworks and eggings abound. And if you were to go to the local farmers’ market on the last weekend of October and try to buy kale, then you would likely find that it was sold out because colcannon is traditional All Hallows E’en fare.