There is absolutely no way of making the traditional Halloween game of Bobbing For Apples look graceful. The game calls for a tub or large bowl to be filled with water and a clutch of apples are set free in it to swim around and generally play hard to get. Participants then clasp their hands behind their backs (BEHIND THEIR BACKS!) and, using only their mouths and their bobbing prowess, grab one of the scuttling apples between their teeth (presumably, as I’ve never heard of anyone being able to hold onto a full-grown apple using mere suction) to win the game.
As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I have issues with this game. Some of those issues are the result of being the loser every single time I was made to play the game as a child. What a relief it was to reach the age of dissent and to turn on my heels and walk away, nose in the air. There are a finite number of talents that each of us are given, and if one has not been granted the talent of picking an apple out of a tub full of water with their teeth, then one should have the decency to just accept that as a fact of life. And I do.
From my former life as a child, I remember attending many Halloween parties and the struggles that accompanied them. Oh, the agony of trying to figure out a costume to wear! Could the costume that we intended for Halloween night actually last through both a party several days before AS WELL AS an additional evening of mad-capped sugar-fueled candy-stockpiling mayhem? Probably not, but since none of us could have come up with two winning outfits in one year, the costume would be sacrificed for the party and then patched up with tape or safety pins for The Night.
However, if there was a mask involved with the costume, it would usually be saved for October 31st and our mothers would be in charge of painting our faces for the party, using their stash of old cosmetics that were years out of date and should have been thrown away already.
Thusly adorned, and fairly vibrating with excitement, we would arrive to the party with the eagerness of…of…kids going to a costume party. Although we were likely to see several versions of our own costume on other kids, the party would be a whirlwind of laughter and running and eating sweets.
At some point during the party the adult in-charge of the event would purposefully parade into the room with a tub of water held aloft, proclaiming that it was time to bob for apples! This never failed to catch me off guard—one forgets about existence of the bobbing for apples game when one never wins at it.
Nothing ruins a full face of expired cosmetics like water, I’ll tell you that, and there is no way to bob for apples without submerging the majority of one’s face in the cold and turbulent waters of a bobbing-for-apples tub. Very few of the adults in charge ever remembered that they should be buying apples with stems sticking way out the top if they wanted the party to move along at a brisk clip, so the time-consuming method of plunging our faces right into the tub in order to deep sea dive after the rascally apples was the technique we fumbled along with.
At the end of the party we would be sent home to our parents with face paint only left on our faces from the eyebrows up. Our remaining beauty products were settled at the bottom of the tub along with everyone else’s.
The origins of this simple, though devilishly hard, game are muddled up with the Romans and the Celts. The Romans brought their beliefs and celebrations along with them when they decided to make themselves at home in the British Isles during the 200-400 AD timeframe. That included their take on bobbing for apples. Theirs was straight forward—whoever got a bite out of one of the apples first, would be the next one to marry. When the Romans finally went home, and stopped playing the game as far as I can tell, the annual Gaelic late harvest festival called Samhain carried on in Britain as usual but with the new slant on things. The Celts, who loved anything that could be interpreted as prophetic or used to predict fertility, reworked the rules of the game that the Romans had left behind, to suit those interests, and made bobbing for apples a regular part of their celebrations.
By the Victorian Era, the game had become popular with young people at Halloween/Autumn parties who wanted to flirt, within the restrictions of the time. Each apple represented an eligible bachelor, and the unmarried women would bob to see who the Fates thought she would marry.
Another version had it that if a young woman was able to get an apple on the first try, her dream-crush would become a reality, and she would live happily ever after. If it took two tries to get an apple, it meant that the dream-crush relationship would happen, but it wouldn’t last. If it took 3 or more tries, it was a sign that the woman should just walk the heck away from the whole idea.
Oh, if it were only that easy to make relationship decisions!
At any rate, no one gets their dating advice from a bucket of cold wet apples anymore, but the game continues to be one that we all know. In these post-Covid days, the thought of trying to bite into an apple that another has already attempted, has quite possibly shut down the game on a wider scale for now. But to those of you who are diehard bobbing fans, I wish you good luck in the pursuit of your winning apple and hope that you chose wisely, picking waterproof face paint this year!
