Analysis: The ring, coin, pea, button, stick or rag you used to find in a Halloween barm brack had different meanings around the country
Recent years have seen an increase in intensity in the commercialisation of Halloween with festive home décor, wreaths, and string lights joining the ever-more elaborate festive garden decorations. Food has seen comparable treatment, with highly coloured iced cakes and sweets.
Amongst the pumpkin-orange, ghost-white and death-dark confections the old reliable barm brack is still holding its own. However, the present-day festive bread has been sanitised of much of its central role in drawing up excitement and trepidation in equal measure.
Up to two generations ago, the Halloween barm brack with an assortment of charms was an established festive plaything for games of divination. Commercial bakeries augmented sales by generating anticipation around the portentous powers of the brack. Wrappers illustrated the potential finds with images of the baked-in charms, including rings, beans, peas, sticks (small chips of wood), rags and buttons.
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Each charm symbolised the fate of the finder in terms of future events, states and fortunes. The joy or deflation at finding whatever charm was baked into your slice of brack aligned to the typical festive activities around food at Halloween.
Food at Halloween had several functions. Traditionally, the festive meal had two elements with a savoury potato dish of colcannon, champ, boxty or potato puddings. Dish choice was often regionally determined with boxty associated with western, northern and north-western counties and potato puddings a feature of some parts of Ulster. Colcannon was a widespread and popular preparation and its strong tie to the festival is evident in the alternative naming of Halloween as Cally Night in some areas.
Sweet breads like soda breads, barm bracks and apple cakes were either homemade or shop bought. Beyond their festive-meal status, these foods served in children's games, in young women’s games of divination and fortune telling, and in the mischief-making of boys from stealing boxty to pulling and scattering cabbages and turnips in neighbours’ vegetable plots.
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Food was also a means of connecting with the otherworld and the dead with prepared meals left and table places set for the returning departed family members and the fairies as they moved around the landscape for the duration of the festival and into the following Christian holy (hallow) feasts of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. This tangle of custom and practice and mix of inherited and borrowed beliefs systems gave Halloween festivities a greater depth of cultural complexity and frisson as compared to other calendar celebrations. It is no wonder then that Halloween gives scope for creative commercialism and equally creative attempts to sequester it as a festival of Irish invention.
The commercialisation of Halloween was well-rooted by the second half of the 19th century and barm bracks were an established part of the festival. They were offered for sale through grocers and bakeries in towns, villages and urban centres.
But the brack was not exclusive to Halloween, as it was an item of everyday confectionary and it also served as a desirable festive bread for Christmas, Twelfth Night and Halloween, with embellishments suitable to the season or celebration in question. Bracks with mottos and charms are associated with these festive occasions. Here, the overlap between the practice of baked-in charms of symbolic and representative significance in Halloween, Christmas and Twelfth Night breads and cakes is notable and points to a borrowing and fusion of home-based and external influences.
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By the early decades of the 20th century, both homemade and shop-bought Halloween bracks had developed an annual role in forecasting the future. The baked-in charms were understood as tokens of fate symbolising significant life events, occurrences and rites of passage. Commercial bracks included rings, peas, beans, buttons, rags, sticks and sometimes coins, while homemade ones had similar items together with more unusual inclusions like thimbles, sloes, nuts, and little holy medals.
In commercial products, the charms had fixed meanings: the ring symbolised marriage within the year, the pea indicated a life of poverty and the bean forecast a life of good fortune. The button foretold the finder as a bachelor or spinster, the rag indicated a life of raggedness and the stick foretold beatings by the finder’s future marriage partner. Similar predictive roles were attached to charms in homemade bracks, but the broader range of charms and their variable symbolic meanings ensured that a greater array of life rites and occurrences were accommodated in the divining activities.
Accounts from the National Folklore Collection illustrate the fluid meanings of charms in practice and customary behaviours. For instance, a bean foretold riches or crossing water; the sloe meant death and the horseshoe symbolised good luck. A hazel nut foretold a life as a spinster or bachelor or crossing water or never marrying; the thimble predicted a life as a tailor or dressmaker or marriage to a tailor or dressmaker and the rag meant a life of raggedness or bachelorhood, a habit or coffin (death). Multiple meanings could be attached to individual charms or else the meaning could vary by location and region. In Sligo the coin indicated the finder would be the longest lived, but it foretold a life of unending riches in Mayo.
READ: The Halloween conundrum: is it a barm brack or a barn brack?
To modern sensibilities, it is alarming to find seemingly casual, repetitive and frequent references to beatings by future marital spouses communicated through the stick charm, but this item also has a high occurrence of fluid meanings. While it is most frequently linked to domestic violence, it also extended to forecasting marriage status (parts of Sligo), order of marriage (Tipperary), death (Cork and Mayo) and a life in religious orders (Wicklow). A predestined life in holy orders was also symbolised in little holy medal charms, as noted by the folklorist, Caoimhín Ó Danachair. The tendency towards assigning variable meanings is also evident in the case of the ring where it is routinely used to tell of an early marriage, marriage within the year or the finder as the first to marry, but it could also indicate death or a long life.
The high profile of marriage in games of divination is also evident in activities of young girls on Halloween night. For example, a physical examination of a cabbage heart and root were believed to foretell the character of the girl’s future lover/husband. Colcannon, beans, herrings and apples were used in stylised and exaggerated behaviours to predict future spouses, while games with burning nuts and beans were read to gauge the future compatibility or otherwise of a romantic pair.
Post-Famine Irish society saw significant changes in marital patterns, with high rates of late marriages and high levels of celibacy
The focus on marriage, marital status and the marital state in games of divination is evident across the sources and accounts of Halloween from the late 18th century, but the emphasis is noteworthy when viewed in the context of late 19th-century Ireland when bracks were becoming increasingly available. Post-Famine Irish society saw significant changes in marital patterns, with high rates of late marriages and high levels of celibacy that were often complicated by changing trends in emigration patterns in the same period.
These Irish peculiarities continued well into the 20th century, and it is tempting to consider if these social realities were reflected in the choice and meanings assigned to brack charms in this period. Rites of passage, the social and economic pressures of poverty and emigration, the lack of agency and self-determination imposed by religious taboos around sexuality and divorce, and the status assigned to a life in the church are the social conditions that seem to be addressed in the Halloween brack through the power of the charms. While rites of passage and concerns around status and occupation are constant to the human condition, it is valid to question if a period-specific Irish world is captured in the Halloween barm brack.
