Halloween Before Pumpkins
Eat an apple at the mirror by candlelight to glimpse your love.
The same moment, today
Waiting for a text back from someone new is a miserable kind of quiet. A person checks the screen, puts the phone face down, and then picks it right back up thirty seconds later. Everyone wants to skip past the uncertainty of whether somebody likes them back. People have always looked for shortcuts to see the end of the story before it happens. Staring into a screen waiting for a name to pop up isn't really that different from trying to spot a face in the dark.
Wanting to know who you'll marry is an old ache. Long before dating apps, people turned everyday objects into fortune-telling tools on Halloween night. An apple and a candle weren't magic on their own, but they gave people a private ritual to test their hopes. Looking into a dark mirror forced someone to sit alone with their own nerves. It let people hope for a glimpse of their future without having to ask the terrifying question out loud.
The lesson
When you're anxious about what comes next, notice how badly you want a sign. Waiting for things to unfold on their own is harder than looking for clues, but it's the only way to find out.
Where this comes from
A warning by candlelight
Scottish poet Robert Burns recorded this rite in his 1785 poem "Halloween," published in Kilmarnock in 1786. In the poem, a young girl named Jenny wants to eat an apple given to her by Uncle Johnnie in front of a looking-glass. She asks her grandmother to come along, but the old woman gets furious. She warns Jenny that testing fate tempts the Devil. The grandmother gets so upset that she puffs furiously on her pipe and doesn't notice a hot ember burning a hole right through her new apron. Later writers like William Hone and Robert Chambers recorded the same mirror custom in the nineteenth century.
People will look into dark glass just to feel sure about who is coming next.
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