Burn Your Nuts! It’s Halloween!

If you set your nuts on fire, you’ll know if s/he will love you forever.

Celebrating Halloween used to be… different.

Or I guess technically, the idea is that if you try to set your nuts on fire and they don’t actually burn up, s/he’ll love you forever.

It’s common for young lovers to have blazing, passionate nuts.

But it’s apparently pretty common for your nuts to explode before they set fire.

So, wait, do you want happy nuts or not?

It’s a fact.

Or something.

Point is, Halloween used to be all about fortune telling games and finding out who you’d marry or what local boy/girl has a crush on you or if your current fling would last longer than Iggy Azalea’s career.

This one kinda goes against the grain b/c according to most accounts, you DIDN’T want your nuts to burn to nothing.

This was such a common game that in the UK, Halloween was sometimes called “Nutcrack Night” or “Nutcracking Night” or something similar. The most common version of the game seems to be that you’d actually name your nuts. You might even write or scratch your name and your lover’s name into each one. Then you’d put them near the fire or, in some cases, right into the coals. Then, if your nut didn’t pop, explode, or completely burn up, it meant you were constant in your love. And whoever’s nut did pop, explode, or burn up completely would be the one who would lose faith or cheat or whatever. If they just turned to coals and smoldered together, then that was a sign that your love would be constant and passionate forever.

That little girl’s too you to be watching his smoldering nuts. What if they explode right at her face?!

This was more common in Scotland and Ireland, and apparently northern England where it was probably borrowed from the Celtic Samhain traditions. And Robert Burns devotes a couple stanzas to it in his semi-famous poem about Scottish Halloween traditions:

The auld guidwife’s well-hoordit nits [nuts],
Are round and round divided,
And monie lads’ and lasses’ fates
Are there that night decided:
Some kindle coothie, side by side,
And burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa, wi’ saucy pride,
And jump out-owre the chimlie
Fu’ high that night.

Jean slips in twa wi’ tentie ee;
Wha ’twas she wadna tell;
But this is Jock, and this is me,
She says in to hersel:
He bleezed owre her, and she owre him,
As they wad never mair part;
Till, fuff! he started up the lum,
And Jean had e’en a sair heart
To see’t that night.
Burns [You can read the whole thing here.]

These nuts are happy until you set them on fire.

So enjoy some trivia, and thanks for indulging my desire to talk about setting your nuts on fire.

It’s true that most young women did essentially emerge from someone’s nuts, but I don’t like this version.

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