Let’s talk, for a moment, about cabbages.
No, I haven’t suddenly decided to start dedicating this blog to St. Patrick’s Day, despite my Irish heritage. It turns out that cabbages were once a very big part of Halloween tradition and lore.
Have you ever wondered about the tradition of pranking on the night before Halloween? I know I’ve had many moments in life when I’ve wondered why, on the night before Halloween, it’s so customary to throw eggs at windows or decorate trees with toilet paper. (Or, if you grew up where I did, partake in actual property damage, in some cases.) I reached a point in my youth where I felt like it was some kind of rite of passage, especially considering how much I loved Halloween and wanted to partake in every tradition relating to it, but I always wondered where it came from.
As it turns out, one of the earliest traditions relating to pre-Halloween pranks is actually rooted in romance...and cabbage.
I recently added this vintage postcard, from around 1912, to my collection. I’ve seen the image around many times, but never thought to look into the reasoning behind it until fairly recently.
The words on the front of the postcard read:
“O, is my lover tall and grand?
O, is my sweetheart bonny?”
Quite a confusing set of words and images to the modern day Halloween fan, isn’t it?
It turns out, many years ago, the night before Halloween, what we know today to be called Mischief Night, Devil’s Night, or, in the area that I grew up in, Goosey Night, was actually known as “Cabbage Night”.
When I first saw this name, my immediate thought was that during this time period, rather than toilet paper and eggs, the primary tool used for pulling pre-Halloween pranks must have been cabbage.
While that fact is true, there is actually much more to the story, and it’s equal parts romantic, magical, and bizarre.
Apparently, an old pre-Halloween tradition for girls was to steal cabbages from neighborhood patches, and somehow, while looking at the leaves, the cabbages were supposed to tell them something about the qualities of their future romantic partners. When they were done, they would then throw the cabbages at neighbors’ homes, just for the sake of causing some mischief, and, I suppose, disposing of the evidence. There are also some mentions of placing cabbages in strange places, and whichever member of the opposite sex was the first to come across said cabbage, was deemed the future lover.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be too much information available on how, exactly, looking at cabbage leaves was supposed to tell you anything about your future lover, but I would definitely be curious to know. I just find it so interesting that this tradition was once so prominent that it was immortalized on a few vintage postcards like this, and also that so many old Halloween traditions and fortune-telling folklores seemed to be centered around romantic predictions. Perhaps this is why there seems to be such a thread linking Halloween and Valentine’s Day, especially within the imagery on vintage cards.
I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if this cabbage tradition had stuck around. Would cabbages be just as prominent in Halloween imagery as pumpkins? Would sales of cabbage heads at Halloween time match that of pumpkins, or maybe even surpass St. Patrick’s Day cabbage sales? Would my internet surname perhaps be “Cabbagehead”? Alas, we will never know. But I am very grateful for this interesting, thought-provoking, bizarre bit of Halloween history.
Stay spooky, my friends. And add a bit of cabbage to your Halloween displays this year, if it suits you.
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