This Hallowe'en night, children and adults will take to dressing up and wandering around their local estate, streets and villages knocking on people’s doors with an expectation of a voluntary donation of sweets, nuts and the odd apple or two.

They will be careful on some doorsteps not to dislodge any ornately-carved pumpkin lit by a modern battery-powered ‘tea-light’, lest it reduce the chance of a welcome.

Readers whose experience of Hallowe’en pre-dates the emergence of the Hallowe’en pumpkin in the parish will remember, with little affection perhaps, when the turnip reigned supreme.

Looking back, I have no idea why nobody ever thought of roasting the turnip first before risking your fingers and sanity carving out a Hallowe’en lantern from its rock-like centre, but then, roast turnip wasn’t ‘a thing’ in the olden days.

Roasting was for carrots and parsnips at Christmas and Easter. Turnips were cut up into chunks for stews, or boiled and mashed for children to turn their noses up and reluctantly eat.

Not eating vegetables hadn’t yet been invented.

Did you know? Only white turnips are turnips. The proper name for what we call ‘turnips’, and Scottish people call ‘neeps’ – those yellow-orangey ones with reddish brown skin (turnips, not Scottish people) – and what others call ‘swedes’ to make them sound more sophisticated and worth the effort of cooking, is ‘rutabaga’.

It comes from the Swedish word, ‘rotabagge’ – a bunch of roots. That probably explains the word ‘swedes’ as well.

People obsessed with the idea of everybody only speaking English, take note.

The richness of the English language owes a great deal to the fact that the Empire stole words from the languages of other countries, as well as their minerals, timber, food and people, thereby enriching the vocabulary along with the monarchy.

Those speakers of other languages who found it necessary or expedient to acquire spoken English as fast as humanly possible also contributed significantly to the diversity of the structure of the language.

Both Hiberno-English and Ulster Scots are examples of spoken English not readily understood by people in England.

Sometimes, they can’t figure out what we’ve said at all, at all!

Believe it or not, there are also people in England who haven’t a clue why, over here, we light bonfires on October 31 instead of November 5!

I was once attending one of those Peace-funded two-day ‘nations and regions’ conferences in England, which happened to coincide with Guy Fawkes Night.

The organisers had laid on some evening entertainment and a trip to the bonfire.

Someone innocently asked why we followed the ‘American’ invention of Hallowe’en, rather than the traditional fifth of November?

Before pointing out that America didn’t invent Hallowe’en – they only replaced the turnip with the pumpkin – I nonchalantly replied: “Probably because the guy on your bonfire was one of us.”

Our very kind and conscientious hosts spent the remainder of the evening apologising for their cultural insensitivity, only to get further caught in the web of several of the ‘us’ Northern Delegation saying Guy Fawkes was not one of them, and Hallowe’en wasn’t their bonfire night.

We were all mischievously ‘only having them on’, but decided not to tell them, just in case it started another complicated conversation on why none of us spoke proper English.

The origins of Hallowe’en go back to the pre-Christian era of Celtic Paganism.

Samhain (pronounced Sao-an) was a ritual festival which ushered in the onset of winter. The word itself means the end of Summer.

‘November’ – Mí na Samhna (Meena Saona) – means the month of Samhain, so it is likely that the ritual revelry lasted well into the month.

The first day of November was Samhain, and also New Year’s Day in the Celtic calendar.

As the changing of the guard between the two halves of the year and their respective Gods, the people believed that on New Year’s Eve – the last day of October – the dividing lines between the physical world and the spiritual world opened.

The rituals protected them both from falling into the ‘other world’, and from coming to any harm in this one from those spirits who, by accident or intent, had wandered into this one.

It doubled up as both a Harvest Festival to encourage the return of the summer in due course, and to appease the spirits and Gods of dark nights.

The early Celtic Christians were smart people. They didn’t challenge Pagan culture – they just sort of hijacked it and repurposed it to serve Christian teaching.

October 31 became All Hallow Eve – the night before the month ‘of the holy souls’, and the people wandering in from some spiritual world became the souls of the deceased looking for prayers and petition to move them on from Purgatory to the Eternal Joys of Heaven, gazing upon the face of the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Nothing to fear here, no ghouls, no changelings, no mischievous faeries or underworld gods – but no reason to spoil the celebrations of the harvest, and an opportunity to take stock and be careful not to leave yourself in danger of wandering around as a lost soul begging prayers to shorten the purgatorial sojourn. Where else would you get it?

Creative ambiguity existed long before the Good Friday Agreement!

Our primitive fascination and fear of fire is even older than our belief in Gods.

Fire, its flames and smoke, are deeply embedded in our emotional core.

Small wonder that fire plays such a central role in our cultural rituals, from the Olympic Flame to the Hallowe’en bonfire, and the fire left burning in the grate, with the hearth swept, and food set out for passing souls on a Hallowe’en night.

Fire has also diminished humanity in the burning of ‘heretics’, witches and enemies.

Who, after two thousand years of Christianity, could watch starving children burning in refugee tents, and would not call on every God that ever existed for instant retribution on the perpetrator?

Every Western leader, bar none – that’s who!