Guizing, skekling and kale casting

As well as bringing the kye [cattle] in for the winter, this was a time of merriment, where young men would don straw suits and straw hats and set off throughout the neighbourhood guizing. This act was a tradition known as skekling.These skeklers would do the rounds, going from house to house, faces covered, collecting small tokens of food.

As with much of Shetland’s lore and calendar days, Winter Day was closely observed. It was said that the Moon’s age could foretell how many days of gales could be expected over the coming winter.

A quick Google search reveals that we may be in for a fine winter this year as the Moon, on the 14th, is only 8.8 days old – happy days! We could usually expect at least 30 days of gales over the course of a winter!

Samhuinn and skeklers

Following Winter Day came the ancient festival of Samhuinn, held on 1 November. Samhuinn was traditionally a Pagan festival that morphed into the festival of Hallowmas as Christianity was adopted, and our traditional Pagan celebrations were given an ‘accepted’ Christian flavour – whilst still retaining many of their conventional Pagan customs.

Hallowmas, or The Feast of All Saints, gives us the roots of the Halloween that we know today. John Spence in Shetland Folklore says that feasts characterised Hallowmas, and we see again the emergence of skeklers and guizers, as men, arranged in squads, go door to door – hoosamyla – and are presented with small offerings of food.

Following the guizing, a feast was held in a neighbourhood byre where all the skeklers and their sweethearts met for a night of feasting, games and fiddle music.

Events like this were important as this was where men and women could meet and forge relationships. Winter was an important time of year for marriage, too, and was traditionally the season for weddings in Shetland. Men were home from sea, and the demands of the croft were fewer during this fallow period, so most marriages took place during the three moons of winter.

But, moving back to Hallowmas, and the link we see with the modern festival of Halloween. It was believed that spirits of the dead returned to Earth to feast among their kinfolk on the eve of Allhallows. This tradition, rooted in Samhuinn and morphed into Hallowmas, was later adapted again, becoming Halloween.

Beware o' da trows!

This evening, the eve of Allhallows or Hallowmas, was also a time that people had to be on guard against the trows – a mischievous race of little people who lived in underground knolls and wreaked havoc on humans. Trows were thought to be particularly active this night, affecting cattle and crops still in the yard. People would often leave offerings for the trows so as not to offend them, and folk were generally on guard against their devilment.

Hallowmas or Hallowe’en was a time of merriment and foys [parties] and eating and drinking. After a long summer tending to crops, animals and the fishing, it was time to relax a little; safe in the knowledge that the cattle were tethered in the byre, the crops in the barn and the boats hauled up in the winter noosts for the year.

The mischief of kale casting

When I was growing up – and my parents before me – one of our favourite Halloween pastimes was kale casting. (Kale is the Shetland word for cabbage and we have our own native variety, which you can read more about on this blog post.) Basically, we would prowl around peoples rigs [vegetable patches], like trows in the night until we found a nice big kale plant that we would dig up, sniggering like the naughty bairns we were. We would then take the plant – gutter and all – and launch it through the front door of the person we had stolen it from. It someone was feeling agile, we would climb on their roof and send it rattling down the chimney right into the heart of their living rooms.

Yes, this was bad behaviour, but it’s also part of our culture, and the wider celebration of Hallowmas, and I can’t say that we ever really got in trouble for doing it – even when a glass screen door smashed one fateful night! These are customs that we are losing today, and that’s a real shame as with it goes another part of Shetland’s rich cultural heritage. I would challenge any adult born before the 1980s to tell me that they haven’t hurled a kale in someone’s front door at Halloween!

Today, kale casting may be less popular but young people still enjoy guizing (the American equivalent of 'trick or treating'), carrying on a Halloween tradition that's existed in Shetland for centuries.

Beware o' da trows and have a happy Halloween!