Body Part Punch for Halloween!

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

My favorite holiday of the year is, indeed, Halloween. Ever since I remember I was fascinated by the holiday. I was one of those kids who was into monsters and make-up and fake body parts. I subscribed to Fangoria magazine and relished reading about Dick Smith's latest creation. Now in my 30s, Halloween has lost some of its magic for me (I think my confession that I would enjoy having children has something to do with recapturing the magic of Halloween).

And, y'all know since my other job involves researching stuff like Halloween, I might as well share some information about the holiday: Halloween marks the beginning of the Celtic new year and the convergence of the world of the living and the dead; according to those who study the pagan sun ritual of Samhain, October 31st is the easiest night to contact and cavort with the dead, and also a time when the dead might voluntarily come for a visit. Of course, nothing today about Halloween has anything remotely do to with Samhain, but that doesn’t stop certain angry religious folks from declaring the horned god “Satan.”

Today what we celebrate as Halloween is largely a commercial venture (rivaled only by Christmas, but not by much, as the aisles in "Big Box" stores should attest), a sort of white-washed Disnification of what was initially a Victorian era evening of divination, then a night to worry about vandalism. We know Halloween is a hodgepodge of celebrations that occur naturally at the beginning of winter and after the harvest, as all sorts of things start to change (so Halloween falls in the middle of seasonal tradition), and so it makes sense there would be various “pagan” holidays around this time of year.

After Christianity had taken over much of the West and the popes had some power, the church re-christened Samhain activities as “All Saints Day.” English revels had costuming. Blast through centuries and you get to the effigy-crazy Guy Fawkes day in Britain (this dude tried to blow up Parliament, and was caught and hanged and quartered and so forth), also celebrating in the States. Somehow all of this evolved by the nineteenth century into doing things with apples in water, or throwing nuts in the fire, or scrying with mirrors, all for the purpose of answering the question: who will I marry?

I kid you not: Halloween in Victorian times was about the impending bonds of matrimony. It is, consequently, a holiday bachelors should fear.

Anyway, Halloween was largely imported to the States, we know, by the Irish and the Scots, which perhaps is why here the holiday was about class division in the early twentieth century. The Great Depression made sure that the cushy Victorian ladies carving pumpkins and getting glimpses of their future beloveds at midnight would soon be under attack by rock-throwing ragamuffins, disgruntled youth, clad in rags, roving the streets.

According to David J. Skal in his Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (Bloomsbury, 2002), in New York city and related areas in the north east, apparently it became common practice to beg for change on Thanksgiving. For some reason the previously generous class stopped giving, and the ragamuffins started “pranking” and vandalizing rich folks’ homes (we’re not talking TP-ing someone’s yard here, but real damage). Apparently folks got the idea to open their doors on the night of pranks as an anti-vandalism tactic. They fed the kids apples and cider and what not. It’s likely that civic groups and schools also started organizing similar kinds of events to keep the kids off the streets. Candy companies got into the gig—and presto, “trick or treat!”

It does seem the case today that celebrating Halloween is a “lower class” or “middle class” thing, that the license to transgress that the holiday now signifies (rivaled only by Mardi Gras, of course) allows one to temporarily escape roles and social position. I am reminded here of the Halloween episodes of Roseanne, which were always about working-class “fun” with blood and guts.

And speaking of blood and guts, you need to serve some punch at your Halloween party! The classic punch on Halloween is termed "floating hand punch." Basically, you wash out some latex gloves, fill them with punch, and then freeze them. Then, you use these "ice hands" instead of normal ice in your punch bowl. It's actually fairly gross and impressive to see.

Serves/Makes: 24

• 1 bottles (2 liter size) lemon-lime soda
• 96 ounces orange juice, pulp free
• 48 ounces pineapple juice
• 1 bottle (1.75 liter size) vodka
• 1 bottle (1.75 liter size) rum