Lake Forest Library: Will you be "guising" this Halloween?

Monday, October 26, 2015

Will you be "guising" this Halloween?

A fellow reference librarian recently recommended the first book in the Scottish mystery series by A.D. Scott, A small death in the great glen (Atria Books, 2010). The story is set in the Scottish Highlands in the mid-1950s, and the main characters are the staff of a small weekly newspaper, the Highland Gazette. Unexpectedly, they have the death (possibly accidental) of a six-year-old local boy to deal with. I expected--and got--an absorbing mystery story, but I also got a glimpse into Scottish Halloween customs.

The author uses several Scottish words and phrases; often their meaning can be deduced from the context. For example, it's October, and quite a few days are described as "dreich," which, according to the Caledonian Mercury Useful Scots Words website,"has several meanings when applied to weather, including wet, dull, gloomy, dismal, dreary, miserable or any combination of these."

As the month of October progresses, the townspeople, both young and old, devise costumes for the purpose of "guising," or dressing up in a disguise for party-going or trick-or-treating. Children carve faces into turnips rather than pumpkins and, at a party, treacle scones are suspended on strings from a clothesline and "hands behind backs, mouths open like baby cuckoos, the children would try to bite through a scone as it swayed in front of them. Invariably a passing prankster would jerk the rope, sending the treacle-soaked scones slap into someone's face or hair or down the back of a neck, to shrieks and taunts of "I got you, I got you!" (p. 206).