Halloween and Childhood Memories

On Friday night I went to watch the fireworks which opened Youghal's Halloween festivities. There was a full moon and the tide was in, the water reflecting eerily in the moonlight. It was the perfect setting.
Looking back on my own childhood, Halloween was pretty low key. Fancy dress costumes were not on sale in every store as they are now and there was no such thing as trick or treat. It was mostly celebrated at home. We bobbed for apples and as far as I remember there might have been a ghost story or two broadcast on the radio and also published in the popular magazines (we didn't have a television until I was a teenager).
For me, at any rate, the biggest thing was the barm brack. This is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins. Traditionally, each barmbrack contained a pea, a stick, a piece of cloth, a small coin (originally a silver sixpence) and a ring. This was a form of fortune telling in which each item, when received in the slice, was supposed to foretell the fate of the person who received it: the pea, the person would not marry that year; the stick, would have an unhappy marriage or continually be in disputes; the cloth or rag, would have bad luck or be poor; the coin, would enjoy good fortune or be rich; and the ring, would be wed within the year. As children, we were very competitive. I remember once getting the stick and being highly upset about it and teased by my siblings. At school next day we always compared what we had found in the barm brack and word would quickly go round that so-and-so had found the coin. I was never lucky enough to find the silver coin. In those days sixpence would have seemed like a small fortune to me!
When I bought a barm brack the other day, I discovered it did have a toy wedding ring. I expect that the other items are no longer allowed for safety reasons. At any rate, the wrapper on this barm brack warned about swallowing the toy ring by mistake. But I am not going to start moaning about lost innocence or the necessity of food safety regulations. Halloween is still a lot of fun and it is refreshing to see that kids still like dressing up and painting their faces. Some things never change.