Hallowe'en feature! Strawberry Hill, goth queens, my spooky playlist, apple cider, and why we light jack-o’-lanterns
October 2023
If we lived on a homestead, we’d have been canning, collecting, and preparing for this snowy moment, confronted with winter. Without a connection to seasonal produce or chores, it feels a little like there haven’t been holidays this year. How-ever, Hallowe'en (less commonly known as Allhalloween,[5] All Hallows' Eve,[6] or All Saints' Eve)[7] is here and we’ll be observing.
Future Short Longs will dive deep into holiday traditions, fire-fuel, and expressions as most of my brain space during these times is wasted in sugar cookies, paper stars, and fireworks.
Noodling on
↔ Strawberry Hill, owned by Horace Walpole, is a property that stood out beside its English Baroque, Palladian, and Italianate peers. It kicked off the Georgian Gothic revival movement with pinnacles, battlements, and a round tower and became an icon. It’s said that this property inspired Walpole’s book The Castle of Otranto, touted as the first gothic novel.
Of course, many female authors would follow this novel, undoing the violence and misogyny that Walpole had accredited the genre. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Dacre were notable authors responsible for the Gothic revival. Many female authors also continued the tradition, with Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein and Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey in 1818 and Emily and Charlotte Bronte with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in 1847.
All potentially because of Strawberry Hill. Where visitors would come to gawk and whip their gaze over their shoulders with a shudder.1
↔ I’ve also been thinking about the Aadam’s Family TV show and the Munsters, which aired only a week later. They would launch the gothic revival into the private space, making little goths at home and prepping the public for the launch of our goth queens:
Christina Ricci via Wednesday Aadams
Winona Ryder via Lydia Deetz
Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, modeled after the cartoon character 10 years previous
Musidora, French actress and film director
Morticia Addams portrayed by various actresses
Siouxsie Sioux, English singer and songwriter
Cassandra Peterson via Elvira
American singer-songwriter and rapper
Kat Von D, tattoo artist and TV personality
Mana, musician, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer
Why
↔ Starting a new section called ‘why.’ Why you ask? Because!
↔Why do we light jack-o’-lanterns? Because of early Celtic rituals. Before the festival of Samhain, celebrated on November 1st, the Celtic people would carve faces into root vegetables, such as beets, potatoes, and turnips, to ward off restless souls.
Lanterns were also quite expensive, so vegetables served as suitable alternatives for many. The carved designs allowed light to shine through while still blocking a potentially extinguishing wind.
Once Ireland had been electrified in the 1930s, the potency of these superstitions
started to fade, but they’d already made their way to the USA. Read more from National Geographic here.
Listening to
↔ If you like playlists:
↔ If you like podcasts:
Making
↔ Hot apple cider squirting up from an instant pot is less sweet than it sounds, plus I didn’t add any sugar. I want to feel in sync with the seasons. One with the harvest that Tomato Mountain CSA delivered to my door. Here is the recipe I used.
Thanks for tuning in. Be safe tonight and light your jack-o’-lanterns!
x
Information and inspiration from the T&J podcast episode titled “Gothic as a Modifier”