Cornwall, being Cornwall, had its own Halloween with its own name, its own saint and its own fruit. Allantide — Kalan Gwav in Cornish, "the first day of winter" — sat at the end of October and belonged, above all, to apples.
Allan apples
The centre of the celebration was the Allan apple: a large, highly polished red apple, sold at Allan markets and given to family and friends for luck.
Children were given one to take to bed and sleep on, under the pillow, and to eat in the morning. It was reckoned a real misfortune to go to bed on Allantide without an apple — the sort of small domestic disaster a Cornish child would remember for a lifetime. In West Cornwall, shops were still stocking the polished apples into the nineteenth century.
The apple under the pillow was not merely a treat. Like so much of this season, it was divination: sleep on it and you might dream of the person you would marry.
Nuts in the fire
Married couples had their own version, tossing walnuts into the fire to test fidelity for the coming year. A nut that burned steadily meant a marriage that would do the same; one that spat and jumped from the hearth meant something else entirely.
This is the same practice found across Britain and Ireland — Halloween was called Nutcrack Night in parts of England for exactly this reason. Two nuts on the hearth, named for two people, and the fire delivering its verdict.
Where the name comes from
Allantide is generally connected to St Allan, a sixth-century Bishop of Quimper in Brittany — an entirely Cornish sort of derivation, given the deep and continuing links between Cornwall and Brittany.
It belongs to a family of Celtic winter-openings: Cornish Kalan Gwav, Breton Kala-Goañv, Welsh Calan Gaeaf and Hollantide, and Irish Samhain. All mark the same hinge in the year — harvest done, dark half beginning — which is the strongest evidence that the festival is genuinely ancient and genuinely shared across the Celtic west.
Reviving it
Allantide faded through the twentieth century but has been revived in parts of Cornwall, particularly around Penzance and St Just, often alongside the broader revival of Cornish language and custom.
It is easy enough to do at home, and pleasantly low-effort compared with carving a mangelwurzel: buy the largest, reddest apples you can find, polish them properly, and hand them out on 31 October. Put one under a child's pillow and tell them why.
Then, if you want the modern version too, our South West fright nights are a short drive up the A30.