Jonny McCambridge: A homemade Halloween, and James and the giant pumpkin

While there was some celebration around All Hallows’ Eve back in the 1980s, it was on a more modest scale.

Without the internet, a local costume shop, or a knowledge of how to use a sewing machine, there wasn’t much opportunity for dressing up back then. Instead, we wore uncomfortable plastic false faces and sometimes wrapped ourselves in an old sheet.

Trick or treating had not yet been popularised on this side of the Atlantic and pumpkins were so alien that they might as well have been grown on the moon.

On a couple of occasions, I remember struggling to try and hollow out a turnip with a knife. It was such a difficult and precarious task that I consider it close to miraculous that I grew up with a full complement of fingers and thumbs.

We did play games which involved apples. We bobbed for them in bowls of water or tried to bite them as they hung suspended from the ceiling on a piece of string.

We ate apple tarts with a coin, or a ring hidden inside, before it seemed to have occurred to anyone that this was a choking risk. There were monkey nuts in bowls on the mantlepiece.

One legacy of the Troubles was that fireworks were completely banned, apart from licensed public displays. Instead we had sparklers, which we swished as if they were swords, leaving trails of light in the night-time air.

There are many ways in which I could measure the difference between Halloween then and now, but perhaps one of the most telling is the rise of the plastic tat. Aisles of supermarket shelves devoted to useless junk with which your house can be adorned. This phenomenon is not exclusive to Halloween, but it becomes particularly noticeable as the summer months give way to autumn.

To the younger generation, much of the excitement seems to revolve around the collection of just such plastic tat. For my son, Halloween is a holiday not far behind Christmas in importance and he expects a similar level of dedication to be given to preparing for it.

But this year, I’ve been slow off the mark. I’ve been busy with work and suffering from a heavy cold (which I don’t complain about). My boy James has been pestering me to get the house decorated for several weeks.

As it is, it is a couple of days before Halloween when I finally get the chance to take him to the shops. As we enter the supermarket, I assure him that we’ll get some spooky stuff.

But there is a problem. There is no Halloween plastic tat. True, there are aisles full of plastic tat, but it is all Christmas themed.

Confused, I stop one of the shop workers and ask: ‘Where is all your Halloween plastic ta … sorry, I mean your Halloween decorations?’

She gazes at me sympathetically in the way one might look at an innocent child.

‘Oh, it’s all gone long ago. It’s all just Christmas stuff left now.’

We try a couple more shops, but it is the same story. Worse, almost all of the costumes are gone. We try to find a good pumpkin, but the only ones left are puny. They are turnip-sized, rather than pumpkin-sized, and a bit mouldy.

We drive home. My boy is more subdued now. I know that it shouldn’t matter, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve let him down. So, to raise his spirits, I tell him that if we can’t buy the stuff, then we’ll just do it ourselves. He starts to get excited again when I insist that we’ll have a DIY Halloween.

We begin by visiting my da, who grows an abundance of vegetables in his allotment. He leads the two of us to his greenhouse where there is an array of some of the largest pumpkins I have ever seen.

James selects the biggest one and tries to lift it. He cannot. I laugh indulgently and then go to lift it. I cannot. Eventually, the giant pumpkin is hauled into the boot of my car. I am used to lifting my son. This pumpkin is much, much heavier.

As we drive home, my boy talks incessantly about the pumpkin. How we will decorate it. How he can’t wait until mummy sees it. How it must be the biggest pumpkin in the world.

The costume shortage is tackled by my wife. She takes some old garments and shreds them, before staining them with teabags and fake blood. With the addition of some face paint, my boy becomes a convincing little zombie. There has been a lot of dressing up in his life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him quite as excited about any previous costume.

We are attending a party with family, and my son promises to help me bake a cake. I have a memory of seeing a photo in a magazine of a Halloween graveyard cake years ago, and I put my mind to how I will recreate it.

A square chocolate cake is baked and iced. I make gingerbread headstones, edible soil from crushed Oreo biscuits, and use chocolate fingers to create a perimeter fence before decorating the cake with jellied sweets.

In truth, my boy’s involvement is limited to watching, a bit of mixing and licking the spoon. But the important thing is that he feels part of the process.

We go to the party with our giant pumpkin, our home-made costume and our improvised cake. James, as he usually does when visiting family, takes his games console with him.

But on this occasion, the console never comes out of his bag. He is having too much fun playing games and trick or treating with his cousins.

Unexpectedly, the highlight of the night becomes the apple bobbing competition. My son is the first to grab an apple in his mouth and runs around the kitchen dancing triumphantly.

I started this column by stating how much Halloween has changed since I was a kid. Perhaps the evolution is not as severe as I thought. This year’s holiday has been a timely reminder that the things which were truly important back then, remain just as important now.