Halloween traditions old and new | Scran Food and Drink Podcast
On this episode, we take a deep dive into Halloween traditions, folklore and food with food historian and writer Peter Gilchrist and Rebecca McEwan from Arnprior Farm.
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00:00Okay, I'm joined by Rebecca and Peter and we're going to have a chat about Halloween,
00:08the past, present and potentially future. But just before we get into it all, could
00:14you guys just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do? So I'll
00:18start with you, Rebecca.
00:20Hi, yes, I am Rebecca McEwen and I am one half of Arnprar Farm, which is primarily a
00:29sheep farm, beef farm up in West Stirlingshire. And along with my husband and his family,
00:37we diversified the farm back in 2015 into growing pumpkins. And it's grown arms and
00:45legs since 2015 and now we grow just around 16 acres of pumpkins and open for a Halloween
00:56pumpkin festival in October.
01:01And Peter, what about you?
01:03Yeah, so my name is Peter. I'm a Scottish food history writer. I kind of try to focus
01:08on working class food culture. But with that, there's a lot of folklore and superstition
01:16and some really great historic feasts.
01:18So that's probably where we're going to start. We all know Halloween now to be sort of quite
01:24Americanised, trick or treat. It's much more popular than I think it potentially was, although
01:29I used to go Geising when I was younger and it was very different to what it is now, what
01:32my nephews do. And Peter, just can you take us back to sort of the origins of Halloween
01:38in Scotland and sort of maybe sort of the food around it as well? Because there's things
01:43like we used to do when I was younger.
01:46I mean, we'll go right back. So we're going to go back to the Gaels coming to Scotland.
01:52So a Celtic tribe, they come over from Ireland sometime around like 500 AD, we think. And
01:58they're prolific cattle farmers. And so they're really in tune with the nature of seasons.
02:04It's not really like other cultures really study the moon and the sun and the movement
02:09of the stars. We're really about recognising the changing world around us because it tells
02:14us when we bring our cows in from the field and when we take them back out again and when
02:18milking season starts and all that sort of thing.
02:21So as we begin to look at the calendar, the Gaels pull out quarter days where they notice
02:26the seasons change and they pile all these superstitions into them. So in the beckoning
02:31of days we have throughout the year, we have a day called seven, which is at the beginning
02:40of November. And the Gaels believed that a day, that dark preceded day. So they thought
02:46that a new day started at sundown and then went into the next day. It's very different
02:50from us. We believe that the day starts when the sun comes up and it's brightness first.
02:54That's what begins things. For them, it was about that darkness. And so when things begin
02:58to die, they think, oh, well, that's the beginning of a new year. And so for a millennia,
03:04the seven was essentially New Year in Scotland. It was a big celebration. And so with that
03:11comes feasting, comes gathering and communities get together.
03:16But one of the kind of really interesting things, I won't get too much into detail,
03:20is that Scotland has polytheism where we have lots of different gods that we worship and
03:27they're all kind of nature gods. They are in charge of the seasons, they're in charge
03:30of the forests, of the animals, of hunting, and we make sacrifices to them. Now, superstition
03:38begins to dictate an idea that these gods will come back on Halloween when the veil
03:45is at its thinnest and the temperature is dropping and things are beginning to die,
03:49the dead can come back and gods with them. And this makes Gaels, early Scottish people,
03:55very nervous. And so they start to dress like these gods. They start to impersonate them.
04:02So we have things like ghoulies and ghastlies, bogies, fairies, banshees, gruggeths, witches,
04:10warlocks, waracos, brownies. Lots of these we don't have any pictures for, but they were
04:16made in the image of these gods. And so when people begin to dress up and to go from house
04:20to house, just in case they run into one of these gods, they begin to act like these
04:25gods themselves, getting up to mischief. And this is the beginning of guising for us in Scotland.
04:30Which is what I'm assuming our generation would have done, but younger people now would be
04:37trick or treating. So the Americanisation of Halloween in Scotland is that, plus probably
04:43more sweets. I mean, we used to go guising for monkey nuts, we used to go bobbing for apples.
04:46So there was like a sort of harvest-y style food to that time of year for us, growing up.
04:54Yeah. What you'll find, not that it's... trick or treating and the connection with
05:02confectionery is definitely very American. And I say that because we didn't have that
05:09level of sugar in this country until, well, kind of into the late 19th century. Working
05:15class people are not affording bags and bags of treats. But we are going door to door,
05:21dressed as gooeys and ghastlies and fairies. And we're getting bannocks, we're getting
05:27cheese, Halloween cakes. These are all things which are part of it. So I think it's... America,
05:34I think is much better at marketing itself, but it definitely has its roots in Scotland
05:39and Ireland.
05:41And Rebecca, we'll just bring you in here. So you said you diversified your farm. You're
05:47one of the longer standing, if not longest standing pumpkin farms. Well, it's not all
05:53you do, pumpkin patches. At what point, and I've probably, you've been on the podcast
05:59before and we've talked about this, but anyone that doesn't listen or doesn't know, at what
06:02point did you think this is actually like a viable thing? Because I feel like in the
06:07last, you've been doing it for almost 10 years. In the last sort of five or so, I feel
06:13like these experiential things where people come along and it's very sort of geared towards
06:18families and social media. At what point did you realise growing pumpkins for Halloween
06:22would be a good idea, as opposed to the traditional turnip, which I know you also do as well?
06:28Yeah. So I think to sort of rewind why we decided to diversify into pumpkins, our farm
06:36is on a really busy road and lots of commuters and tourists. And we wanted to grow something
06:42that we could sell sort of almost from the doorstep. And it was looking at different
06:47options, whether it be sunflowers, lavender, pumpkins. And my husband just happened to
06:52be on a forum where you could see the pumpkin craze almost become something down south,
06:58like in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, you know, in the hotter climates, you know, like
07:03nicer weather farming areas of the UK. So pumpkins were really starting to take off
07:08in England a little bit, sort of mid, round about early 2000s. Yeah, 2000 and probably
07:169, 10. They were starting to creep into supermarkets here. But I think there was only one other
07:21place in Scotland that had experimented growing pumpkins. So we thought, why don't we make
07:27a pumpkin farm at Halloween in October? And we decided to grow 300 pumpkin seeds in 2015,
07:36not knowing if we could grow them, just sort of experiment. And we got quite a good crop
07:42and we really didn't expect it to kind of kick off because I think the whole experiences
07:48of people coming out to farms is only starting to, you know, become something there wasn't
07:53many farm experiences. I know there's like lavender fields now, there's sunflower fields,
07:59you know, there's more and more things in the last 10 years, you know, becoming a day
08:04out and the pumpkin, the pumpkin day out has become sort of quite a tradition for families
08:09now. So every year we've increased our numbers a little bit more with pumpkins. But yeah,
08:19it's funny because I didn't grow up with pumpkins. I was very much carved the turnip
08:24and have a smelly turnip burning away in your house. And I think the pumpkins are still
08:32quite a challenge to grow. There's probably a reason why America and southern England
08:37are, you know, pumpkin growers. We are still, even 10 years later, trying to suss out the
08:43right variety for Scotland. We really need something that's got quite a hard skin, obviously,
08:51probably more similar to a turnip. But the beautiful lantern style of a pumpkin, I think
08:57that's really what's the attraction when it comes to carving a lantern.
09:02And you still, so you do turnips as well. Do you find them as popular or are people
09:07kind of over it because they are really hard to carve?
09:10I think it's all the commercial commercialism of the pumpkin now, isn't it? I think I really
09:17loved hearing about the tradition, the Scottish traditions there. And it's almost made me,
09:21it's kind of like lighted a fire inside me to try and teach people almost on the patch
09:26when they come. I must have you for a guest speaker.
09:29Please, yeah.
09:30I love that because I'm fascinated by the history there. I think probably so many children
09:37that visit at the moment are, you know, I think obviously you have Snoopy visiting the
09:42pumpkin patch. There's all these Americanisms that are really, the pumpkin has almost become
09:49like an icon of Halloween now. And I think turnips are popular because probably more
09:56people prefer to eat turnips. They probably prefer the taste of turnip because pumpkin
10:00is quite, it needs a lot of flavour added to it when you cook with it. But I think pumpkins
10:07for the children picking will probably still be more popular. But the turnips are something
10:12that we feel is an important little area of the patch just for some heritage or some nostalgia.
10:19Definitely. For anyone that doesn't know Peter, what is the deal with the lanterns like historically?
10:28I'm about to put forward a hypothesis today that might be slightly confrontational. But
10:36I'll say the preamble is that we believe that carving vegetables at Halloween really goes
10:46back to an Irish tradition, again, that was brought over by the Gaels, which is about
10:49carving, originally, radish, the smaller, softer turnips and apples into evil faces.
10:59And these faces were hung, kind of like ghastlies are on a church, they were hung at the doors
11:03and the windows to ward away evil. Now, in 1620, the Swedish turnip is discovered and
11:14it comes over to Scotland in the 1790s. Now when it comes over, they're really great animal
11:19feed because they don't rot in the same way that other vegetables do, they've got a really
11:22low water content. And it means that the flies aren't attracted to them, you can keep them
11:26in a barn in a store and they're used to feed cows and pigs. And then we have, at that time,
11:35a transfer of carving small, soft turnips. And people go, well, there's all this waste
11:41that's going to go get fed to the animals. Let's carve a Swedish turnip. Now, even back
11:46then, if we're thinking about in the 1800s, turnips were harvested and then left for a
11:49month or two before they were carved at Halloween. They were quite soft when you're starting
11:54to dig into them. Sometime around four generations ago, when people started buying Swedish turnips,
12:01Swedes, the kind of yellow and purple turnips that we eat from supermarkets, and then pretended
12:06that you would be able to carve them with a knife. This is not, I'm going to, my hypothesis
12:11is Swedish turnips were never meant to be carved in this way. And every year we say,
12:16well, they've been carved for a thousand years like this. They really haven't. I think it's
12:22a bit of emperor's new turnip. And every single person I've spoken to has horrendous memories
12:28of growing up, trying to spoon out this stoat in Swedish turnip. And normally what it ends
12:36up going to is a dad with a drill or a hacksaw or something. And everyone talks about this,
12:42the horrible smell of drilling into a Swedish turnip, filling the home. We actually just
12:49need to give it up a wee bit or lean into it, but microwave your Swedish turnip first
12:53so that it will be easier to carve.
12:56So we've been gaslit into thinking that it's okay to carve the turnip the way it was.
13:01This is, I think we can call this generational trauma. Everyone's like, well, my dad's
13:06dad made me do it. Well, my dad made me do it. Actually, we need to break the chain now.
13:12And as a people give up the ghost, we're not supposed to be carving Swedish turnips.
13:16Well, there you go. We're supposed to be carving pumpkins.
13:22You know, the conversation about what is Scottish, what is tradition is a really difficult one.
13:28If my grandparents did it and my parents did it, does that mean that it's Scottish now
13:32for me? Is it part of my cultural identity? I grew up, there was carving pumpkins. I have
13:37a younger brother who is 18 years younger than me. He has never known anything else.
13:42So I think, I think we can keep up with the pumpkins. And actually, if you want to try
13:46doing a turnip microwave at first, have a go at it, but let's not try and do it raw.
13:52It's both very, very dangerous to try and have a child chopping into a stone in turnip.
13:59I think we can, we can expand the tradition a wee bit as well.
14:03The things that you got away with with children in the 90s in terms of like, take a knife,
14:07take this turnip, it'll be fine. There's also a candle.
14:11Yeah, it's a wild level of danger that we just, for a night, we're like, yeah, go for
14:17it. Here's a machete and a rock. Go wild, yeah.
14:26So just to sort of go, so you talked about your, what you did at Halloween, Peter there
14:31with the turnips and stuff. Was it the same for you, Rebecca? You would have been carving
14:34turnips and, or trying to carve turnips and your kids obviously not doing that now.
14:40So yeah, no, growing up, I was from rural Galloway and yeah, used to, it was all very
14:46much homemade costumes, bin bag liners and lots of dodgy face paints. And yeah, there
14:53was lots of dicking for apples, carving turnips. And then it was always the donuts that were
14:58hung on pieces of string that you would have to get. So yeah, fantastic childhood memories
15:05and not so many guising because I was from a farm, you know, we'd maybe go into the local
15:10village when you're older, but you'd usually go to like family members and there'd never
15:14be a trick. It would always be a little poem that you'd have to learn or a little song.
15:19And yeah, so now our kids, I've got a 14 year old, a 12 year old and a nine year old.
15:26So we go to our local village and guise and embarrassingly, I'd probably do a panic carve
15:33because we're so busy with pumpkins right now. And then we've got 14 days, 15 days of
15:39pumpkins and then we do a panic, a panic carve. And it's amazing the artwork that some people
15:46will like send us of the amazing pumpkins they do carve. But I think my ability as a cat
15:54or a scary face, there's not much creativity after a month long of pumpkin madness.
16:01So yeah, I can imagine you're probably sick of the sight of them by the end of October.
16:07Probably by, yeah, no, it's all good. We're actually talking about, you know, it's actually
16:13quite interesting hearing about all the different vegetables that used to be, you know, back in
16:16time that were, that were carved. Obviously the image that people have is this wonderful
16:22orange pumpkin, like the modern day image of a lantern is an orange pumpkin. But actually one
16:28of my favourite varieties to carve on the farm is our water goblins. And they've got lots of
16:34little warts on them. And they probably are quite a hard skin, but they make a, because they're so
16:41hard skinned when you do carve them out, they don't rot, you know, because usually when you
16:45carve a pumpkin within about five days, it's turned to mush because it's such a soft fruit,
16:51it's so high in water. So with a water goblin pumpkin, which we've got quite a lot of this year,
16:56when you carve it, it actually stays quite skeletal, you know, you can almost
17:01keep it for a few weeks. So they're my favourite ones to carve on the patch.
17:07Sounds like a good, a good compromise between a pumpkin and a turnip.
17:10Yes, absolutely.
17:13And so, yeah, you mentioned they are ducan frapples. And when we did Halloween parties
17:17when I was young, it would be a similar thing, but it wasn't a donut, it was like a scone
17:21dipped in treacle. And you used to have to try and like, you know, not use your hands to try
17:26and get a bite out of it. What's that got to do with anything, Peter? Do you know? Because I've
17:31looked into this, I can't work out why we did it.
17:33So when apples are considered a real kind of divine fruit at this time of year,
17:40mostly because there's an ample supply of them. And so if you're going to play games with a fruit
17:45or a vegetable, you want something that is high in supply, and it can get tossed into the animal
17:50pen afterwards for them to eat. So there's two, what you call ordeals that are considered kind
17:57of tied with the apple, trial by water and trial by fire. Now, water is quite simple. It was about
18:04going into, you know, ducan frapples. It was about going through the water to try and catch an apple.
18:10There's some kind of old folklore about it passing through the realm into the afterlife to get the
18:16fruit because apples were considered something to be in abundance in the afterlife. The other one,
18:21by fire, is where an apple would have a candle put into it, drilled into it, and then it would be
18:28hung up on a string, and it would spin. And everyone at the party would try to take a bite
18:34of the apple as this candle was spinning with the apple. Now, it's a small candle.
18:39You might send you some hair, but there's a bit of risk and a bit of danger to it.
18:44And that tradition then grows into the treacle and scone, because maybe not fire, but you can
18:50get a bit of a messed up face. And it's still that same sort of idea. The apple takes a back seat,
18:56but the danger and the trying to maneuver around something dangling from the ceiling.
19:00And then really, at the end, kind of late 1900s, the millennial season, sugar doughnuts become
19:07really popular for parties. And that's when we see the kind of sugar doughnuts hung up on the string
19:14for people to try and eat their way around.
19:17That's great, because I have never been able to work out what was going on with the treacle and
19:20the scone. But I do remember it being just messy, and it was in your hair, and yeah.
19:25Well, there's lots of what we talk about around Halloween superstition and folklore.
19:30We say, I believe, or it has been said, because we're relying on a couple of texts. One of them
19:35is this book. It was written by Florence Marie McNeill. And she wrote this in, I think it was
19:42the 1920s, she wrote this. And it was, essentially, it's outlining the folklore and the recipes that
19:50are part of Halloween Scottish history at that time. And Florence, she was a principal researcher
19:57for the Scots Dictionary. She was the organizer for the Scottish Women's Suffragist Federation.
20:04She was really connected, and she toured across Scotland, just collecting stories, collecting
20:08words, and collecting recipes that she then put into a series of books. So these are our main
20:13insights into our folklore history. But lots of it's oral history. Lots of it wasn't written down,
20:20perhaps, in the way that slightly more middle class or upper class traditions were, that we
20:24know lots about the royals. But what was happening in cottages and crofts, that was really left to
20:29oral history. But we do have some insight into it. And just to say, that book is called Halloween.
20:35Yes. Halloween, it's origins, rites, and ceremonies in the Scottish tradition.
20:41It is out of print, and it's a very small book. And there are some on eBay for like 400 pounds.
20:47But if you watch it on eBay, because sometimes someone's getting rid of one and don't quite know
20:52what they have. But it's a really fantastic resource for anyone that wants to get into
20:56a wee bit more of Halloween history. Yeah, it's definitely a great source book.
21:03That's it. Yeah, I'll keep an eye out for that and get a cheaper one. So yeah, we're
21:11obviously talking about Halloween and all the different foods and things. But it's also,
21:15right now is a time of harvest. And there's quite a lot of different sort of things that we should
21:19be eating if we're going to eat seasonally. So what would be your sort of favourite thing to
21:25maybe cook or look out for at this time of the year? And if it includes pumpkins, that's fine,
21:31Rebecca. I think for us, we probably are guilty of not eating many pumpkin based
21:39foods at this time of year. But my favourite sort of food to cook at this time is it's soups,
21:46stews, the slow cooker is out all the time. So yeah, just very much stews and casseroles. But
21:52we probably as a family don't eat much pumpkins. But if we were to eat pumpkins,
21:57it would usually be in soup form. We actually supply one of our local gastro pubs in Kippen.
22:04They've actually just asked for some pumpkins this week for their risotto.
22:09I'm very much a meat eater. I probably eat a lot of beef, lamb. But when it comes to risotto,
22:16it's not something that I'm, yeah, it's not something that I eat. But I know it's a very
22:21popular dish up at the Inn at Kippen. So yeah. And it's nice for them to say they're from the
22:27farm just down the road that people have probably just come from. Yeah, no, absolutely. There's
22:32quite a lot of our local businesses. People that have visited the pumpkins go to the local delis
22:39and farm shops and pubs. So for them to have our pumpkins for the risotto, I think it's quite a
22:44nice connection. Nice. And Peter, what about you? If I'm wanting to eat something seasonal,
22:55and when I say seasonal, I mean, if you're going to invest in a dinner, if you've got something
22:58nice and you want to go to your butcher and get something, you get really fantastic lamb this time
23:03of year. People really think about spring as lamb season, but really it's spectacular,
23:07spectacular lamb as we're coming into winter. And with that, I think brambles and kale are a really
23:13fantastic combination that are also in season. We can get lots from Scottish producers.
23:18And if it's a soup, I'm currently trying to work on a sherry wine honey turnip soup,
23:27which sounds a bit odd, but trust me, the development is going well. It started out
23:33as a parsnip and I wanted to move it across to a turnip, but lots of like, yeah, thyme,
23:37heavy on the spice, topped with some hazelnuts as well. Because again, hazelnuts are
23:42right up there for both historically seasonal foods, food that was eaten around Halloween and
23:46coming into the colder months. But yeah, also always fantastic to add a wee bit of
23:52crunch or texture to a dish. Sounds great because I never know what to do with turnips. I get a
23:56veg box and when we get a massive turnip, I'm like, oh no, we're going to have just
24:00highest neeps and tatties. That's the only thing I can think. So that sounds great. So just to touch
24:07on the hazelnut thing, is that also, does that lean into what monkey nuts, obviously we would
24:12be giving monkey nuts for when we went out geysing. Is that kind of similar tie-in or not really?
24:18I think monkey nuts really come from that American culture when people begin to see it
24:22coming through. Hazelnuts are what would be cob nuts in the wild, are part of Scottish
24:32forests for the last millennia. We've got hazelnuts in ample supply and in the Halloween
24:38book, Florence interviews people talking about, you used to sew an apron up either side and you
24:43go into the forest and use it as a bit of a bucket and collect as many hazelnuts as you can.
24:48Then people would sit around the fire shelling them, toasting them, eating them. And there's
24:52some folklore around matchmaking you would do with cob nuts, with hazelnuts, where you'd put
24:57two on the fire and ask it to tell you if you were going to marry your beau. Every part of
25:04divination for the last 200 years has been about who am I going to marry? But if the cob nuts would
25:10sit on the fire and would sizzle together, then you were destined to be in love forever. But if
25:15one of them spurted out or they cracked or they started to burn right away, then your romance was
25:20doomed. So hazelnuts are definitely far more part of our historic culture and our traditions
25:26around Halloween and I think monkey nuts are really, really an American thing.
25:30There was Americanization even back in the 90s, that's good to know.
25:35Oh yeah, I mean Halloween, I think it was kind of the kind of mid-19th century,
25:39mid-Victorian era. It started with a woman who I probably think was Scottish or Irish and had
25:44gone over and she created kind of trick-or-treating in America as a way to entertain children,
25:52because children on Halloween used to run around and would really mess things up. It was like a
25:57yob, mob mentality of graffiti, of kicking plants, of knocking down fences and she began this
26:05tradition where she gave them candy as a way to keep them calm and give them a bit of direction
26:12and that really kind of exploded in popular culture over in America
26:16and then we inherited back some of the traditions that we had already given to them.
26:22And so with the hazelnuts, this is just reminding me of, there was quite a lot of
26:27sort of folklore and like trying to predict the future in food and we've got an article and
26:33I'm going to pronounce this wrong and you can correct me if I am wrong, something around
26:37Halloween in like furag or something and it's like, is it mashed potato and people put things in it?
26:42Maybe I'm, hold on, I'm not, we're probably not pronouncing this right, but do you know what I mean?
26:48Yeah, well so you have, there's a couple of things when you're in the Highlands and Islands,
26:53chances are you've got a cow on your property, you've got one cow at your croft and so you've
26:57got an ample supply of milk and cream and so you would switch or whisk your cream and add in
27:03toasted oatmeal that you milled either on your property at your local mill and would either
27:08season it with vanilla or rum and then you would throw charms into it. People would kind of dig in
27:13with a wooden spoon to try and find the charm, a bit like a clouty dumpling, clouty dumplings were
27:19also kind of used at that time, anything that allowed you to have a bit of mystery around what
27:24am I going to get, what is my future, what is my, what's in store for me this year that became very
27:29popular and in the kind of central belt that became mashed potatoes because again an ample
27:35supply and people didn't have an ample supply of cream but it's the same sort of idea, you're
27:38digging into a big bowl with everyone at the party to try and find the charm.
27:44And do you see these things kind of coming back like if people have dinner parties or
27:48parties and maybe sort of try it again for a laugh or do you think everything's kind of moved on since?
27:53No but I think the way, I think, I'm not going to get too woo-woo here but I definitely think people,
28:00I'm 38, 32, I see in all my friends and some of my younger friends and some of my older friends
28:07we're looking for some sort of spiritual practice, we're not looking for religion
28:12but we are looking to engage a bit in mysticism, we are looking to feel connected to some sort of
28:17folk belief, I think that's really popular and so maybe not everyone grabbing a spoon to a big bowl
28:25of mashed potato at a party but there are other traditions that we can begin to lean into, whether
28:30that's cooking with hazelnuts and apples or whether that's doing a bit of carving, me and my friends
28:36last year we did mask making, we made witches and evil characters and things, we tried to look at
28:45some of the old masks and things that you would have made in the kind of late Victorian era
28:50and tried to copy them. There's a bit of craft, if you've got friends that are into craft you can do that,
28:55if you're perhaps slightly more of a mature disposition then there are some really
29:03interesting notes about what people used to eat at Halloween when you were perhaps that
29:09slightly older teenager not into guising, you would fill a pram or a buggy with goods and you
29:14would go door to door and exchange the goods you had to come in and sit by the fire, so it was
29:20things like burston brunies which are essentially like a oat gingerbread and you would have cheese
29:25and you would have kind of dried meats and things, I think it's kind of like a what you might call a
29:30modern day charcuterie board, a grazing board, but there's lots of really great Scottish produce
29:35and I think if you can be doing it mindfully, if you can think about I'm going to purchase
29:39things from a local seasonal supplier and we're going to eat it together and when you're doing
29:45that you're maybe creating a bit of a new tradition but also leaning in to your history, you know
29:52cultural heritage is there to be claimed and you have to, it's an action, it's claiming it because
29:58if you don't claim it, it dies away and there's lots of things that we just don't do anymore,
30:02there's lots of traditions we don't know about because Florence didn't write them down in her
30:06book because she never met anyone that knew about the obscure traditions existed in Paisley where
30:11I'm from and so they just died out and it is our kind of responsibility as modern Scots to keep
30:18something alive but not doing it in a way that's overly taxing but in a way that fits with our life
30:24as is now. Which brings me nicely back to you Rebecca because you were saying people are
30:29becoming, it's become a tradition for people to visit you, pick pumpkins, you know there's, you
30:33have a photographer there, so I've gone pretty much most years since my oldest nephew was quite
30:39young so we've got pictures of like you know him being really young and then the youngest one and
30:44so this sort of ties into what Peter said about like a modern sort of Halloween tradition so
30:49for anyone that hasn't been to pick pumpkins at your farm before what can they expect and do you
30:54still have tickets available? Yes, so you know it sounds as if the sort of nice community
31:01gatherings of you know years gone by is maybe translated now into sort of mini festivals on
31:07farms so you know it's a tradition that's becoming something for so many families and
31:15you know quite a lot of families that have been coming since 2015, 2016 and gathering pictures
31:21of the same photo boards every year and seeing how their children grow and that's probably one
31:26of the most popular events, things to do when they do come to pick their pumpkin. So to give
31:32you an idea when you come to the farm you're very much coming to a real working farm, we have
31:39all the sort of photo board opportunities, we have a pumpkin cannon which fires pumpkins or turnips
31:45into the field which is very sustainable because sheep eat the pumpkins and turnips afterwards,
31:52like to add. Then we also have a few little rides, we have a quad pod, we have a hay barn,
31:59we have bale mountain, we also have tatties to dig because traditionally October holidays for
32:05many Scottish families would have been like tatty hooking, howking, I can never remember,
32:10digging for tatties. So we've kept that tradition where you can come and fill a bag, a net bag of
32:17potatoes. We have local food trucks, we have lovely coffee, we have a gin bar which does gin cocktails.
32:26So we open on the 12th of October right through till the 30th and we still have tickets for both
32:32weeks, varying from 9am in the morning. And then we also have a date night which is a country
32:39theme this year with line dancing and traditional folk music and western music and that is on
32:46Friday, Saturday the 28th and there's still tickets for that as well. So it's just about
32:56getting people together and celebrating autumn and funnily enough when we first started doing
33:02the pumpkins I never really had much of a Halloween vibe as in I didn't really include
33:08skeletons or witches or ghosts in any of my photo boards, I made it very much of an autumn harvest
33:15theme. So this year I've maybe got a few little Halloween themed photo boards but that's purely
33:25because a lot of our visitors quite enjoy the spooks and just trying to cater for everybody.
33:37Well I can attest it's been a great family day out and if you're not driving, yeah the gin
33:42is good because there's a lot of kids. It is good and you can take your dog. I took my dog and
33:49dressed him up in a pumpkin onesie last year and it really went down. He hated it but everyone loved it.
33:54There's so many dog outfits, it's unbelievable. People go to town with their dog jumpers.
34:02Well thank you very much guys, it's been really interesting to find out more about the
34:07history. Peter, I've learned a lot, there's a lot that is not on the internet I'll tell you
34:12that for one thing and Rebecca thank you so much. I know it's a busy time for you but I'll
34:18be seeing you in a couple weeks because I'm bringing my nephews again. So yeah thank you guys
34:22and hope you have a happy Halloween when it comes. Thank you. Happy Halloween or blessed Samhain!