Photo by Mohamed Nohassi
When I was a kid growing up in England and, later, Australia, Halloween wasn’t really a thing. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing for a kid keen on community-sanctioned mischief to get excited about. Granted, during October noone was rushing about organizing costumes, stockpiling candy or dreaming up ways to traumatize neighborhood children, but that’s because people were too busy getting ready for Guy Fawkes Night.
Who was Guy Fawkes, and why should he have his own night, you ask? Guy Fawkes was part of a group of rebellious English Catholics who hatched a plot to assassinate King James I (a Protestant) by blowing up the English House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605. The Gunpowder Plot, as it came to be known, was foiled when an anonymous letter tipped off authorities to search a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament, where they encountered Mr. Fawkes stashing thirty barrels of gunpowder. The rest, as they say, is history—in which Guy Fawkes was arrested, tortured into confessing, and hanged by his hated Protestant overlords.
That might’ve been the end of the story were it not for the fact that some enterprising public relations person in King James’s retinue suggested designating November 5 an official day of thanksgiving to celebrate the plot’s failure. Across Protestant England, “Gunpowder Treason Day” as it was originally known, evolved into a major state celebration, with communities turning out each November 5 to build straw dummies of “Guys,” (apparently this is where use of the word “guy” as slang for a boy or man comes from), then burn them on huge public bonfires—occasions for much merry-making, fireworks-shooting, general tomfoolery; and, no surprise, anti-Catholic sentiment. You have to imagine that English Catholics would have found the whole thing in rather poor taste. At some point, since the event’s central activity was the building and burning of the straw “Guy,” Gunpowder Treason Day came to be popularly known as “Guy Fawkes Night.”
Amazingly, nearly four hundred years later, the tradition was still observed where I grew up, although the effigies had usually evolved to depict more contemporary figures: politicians, TV personalities, coaches of losing sports teams and such. In other words, in English and Australian towns during the 1970s and ‘80s, thousands of small children were still getting excited at the prospect of burning fake traitors in the town square.
Given the American aversion to royalty, it’s no surprise that a festival hell bent on celebrating the survival of an English king fell from favor around the time of the American Revolution. Still, when Halloween rolls around, I can’t help feeling that the lack of a group activity involving burning effigies (European royalty? Tech CEOs?) is a missed opportunity.
After moving to America, I took a swing at this. For a decade when our kids were small, we hosted a country Halloween party that grew larger and more raucously unhinged with each passing year. To begin with, it was a benign affair involving candy and cute costumes and pumpkin carving. As the kids got older, scary ghost stories and a hayride through the darkening woods were added. One year someone spiked the punch and the grownups all got knee-walking drunk, but I still missed the gothic weirdness of a Guy Fawkes-style bonfire. The following year, I added one. In a clearing between two creepy, tumbledown barns, I built a massive, scarecrow-shaped installation using all the fallen limbs accumulated across summer, plus bamboo, burlap, and straw, then soaked the whole thing with diesel for good measure. On the party invitation I’d pitched this as a marshmallow-roasting bonfire, but when lit it exploded forty feet into the sky, growing so huge and terrifying that any costumed child who tried to get close with a toasting fork would have gone up in a blaze of polyester. Still, the kids were as mesmerized by it as their parents were traumatized, so maybe a seed was planted. A mob of costumed children jacked up on candy and raw marshmallows never had so much fun.
While I haven’t been in Australia in October or November for years, I hear that these days, the old Guy Fawkes bonfire tradition has given way to Halloween. This might be because of the country’s weakening bonds to English traditions, or maybe to climate change, since in bushfire-prone eastern Australia, large-scale public blazes have rather fallen out of favor. But according to my English cousins, Guy Fawkes Night there remains as popular as ever. So, this November, if you see plumes of smoke rising from the sun-drenched uplands of West Feliciana parish, don’t worry: it’s just me feeling homesick.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
