31/10/2026
Happy Halloween! It’s all a bit commercialised nowadays but I love the historical roots behind it all 💚🎃
Scottish Roots
Long before anyone in Scotland said trick or treat, the children at the door on Halloween were guisers, and they had to earn their reward. 🎃
The word comes from guise, meaning disguise, and it is old. The Dictionary of the Scots Language traces the form gysar back to 1488, when it meant a masked mummer, and for centuries guisers turned up at Yule and Hogmanay as well as Halloween. By the twentieth century the custom belonged above all to the last night of October, and to the children.
The disguise was the whole point. On the night when the old Scots believed the spirits of the dead and the fairy folk were wandering abroad, dressing up as one of them was a way to pass among them unharmed. So out came a father's old coat, a granny's shawl, a sheet with two holes cut in it, a mask made from cardboard. Lanterns were carved from turnips, the dreaded tumshie that took an evening of scraping and sore fingers, and they glowed with a fierce little face all the way down the street. 🏮
But nobody got anything for simply standing at the door. A guiser had to perform. A verse of a song, a poem learned at school, a joke, a wee dance on the step. Only then would the bowl come out: an apple, a handful of nuts, perhaps a few pennies if the house was feeling generous. Many grown Scots can still recite the party piece they did at every door in the street.
That is the quiet difference in the Scottish version. It was never about demanding something. It was a small exchange of gifts, a song for an apple, and a whole street of neighbours opening their doors in the dark to welcome the children of the village.
Somewhere in your family there may be someone who still remembers the words they sang on the doorstep. 🍎 What was your party piece when you went guising?