Bad Manners and Brimstone

Ah yes! Candied apples! I don't think I've seen one in a long time. I remember eating them as a kid though. The candy was the red, hard, stick-in-your-teeth kind of stuff and not a whole lot of the apple itself got eaten.

I do see caramel apples sometimes for sale in candy/chocolate stores. I often wonder who still buys those.

Candied and caramel apples are hard to eat, messy, and IMO not all that great. They do LOOK quite tempting though.

I buy caramel apples, and I love them.  Especially the ones covered with peanuts!

I realize i havent been here in years. Life happened. But. Meet my SDiT, Merlin!

I remember bobbing for apples as a kid and I hated it. Glad it's gone as a tradition because it's really just a big tub of saliva after about the third kid. Plus it's just hard to do.

I have also seen it set up by hanging the apples by a string instead of putting them in a tub of water. Still hard but maybe not quite as gross.

I don't necessarily remember it as specific to Halloween although that does make sense.

I do remember apples being a legitimate trick-or-treat bag filler. I remember always coming home with one or two in my halloween bag at the end of the night. I don't think any of us ever ate them though. Who wants an apple when there's all that candy!

I don't know what my mom did with them. Probably threw them away.

Then someone (supposedly) stuck razor blades in the apples they handed out so that put an end to that.
I say "supposedly" because who knows. Might have happened. Might have been urban legend. But anyway, that was the story when I was a kid.

Bobbing for apples was associated with Halloween in America for years.  I haven't heard about it in a while because it is now considered unsanitary.  No Halloween/Apple customs otherwise that I know of.  Candy Coated apples are less popular too.  Skeletins, zombies, gravestones  etc have gained in popularity for decore.

I've once again been observing how in the last decade or so the traditional English Halloween has been completely swamped by imported American merchandise, to the extent that everybody knows instinctively that a particular shade of orange = Halloween-themed, even though pumpkins aren't native to Europe and weren't grown and rarely ever imported here before the millennium. (The early settlers in New England were used to carving their Halloween lanterns out of turnips, but finding no turnips in the New World they made do with pumpkins instead.)

I was wondering whether any of the traditional customs are still practised at home, and it occurred to me for the first time what a large part apples played in the Halloween of my youth. At parties on 31 October apple-bobbing (apples are floating in a tub of water, and you have to kneel down with your hands behind your back and grab one with your teeth) was absolutely de rigueur. It's a fun party game, but unlike other party games such as Pin the Tail on the Donkey, it was only ever played at Halloween. Nobody ever said this, it was just understood. And of the many ways in which one could predict one's future on that night, by far the commonest was to peel an apple all in one strip without breaking it and, standing up and not looking backwards, throw it with the right hand over the left shoulder. Then turn around and look, and it will have fallen in the shape of the initial of the person you're destined to marry.

Well, of course apples are in season in October, so it's natural that they would be eaten and used at any festival taking place then (the same is true of turnips), but they are also traditionally a magical fruit (think Eve and the serpent, Snow White, many Grimm tales) so I wonder if there's more to it than that. And whether there are Halloween apple customs where you live?