Also called apple paring divination, Halloween apple peel
Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw it over your shoulder, and read the letter it makes on the floor as the initial of a future partner.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Peel away from your body with a sharp, small knife or a peeler; dull knives slip. Keep the floor clear so no one trips while turning.
Gay's shepherdess Hobnelia works a string of real country charms to win back Lubberkin. She pares a pippin in one strip, throws it over her head, and finds it has formed an L. The poem is one of the earliest dated records of the custom.
Uses: pippin apple
Irish schoolchildren recorded the custom from family and neighbors in the late 1930s. Some say over the right shoulder and some the left, but all agree the peel must not break and the letter is the future spouse's initial. It sat alongside nut-roasting and fishing for coins in a tub.
Uses: apple
Immigrants carried the game to North America, where it became a party staple on Victorian and Edwardian Halloween postcards, often shown as a young woman tossing the peel by lamplight.
Uses: apple
Apples and Halloween go together across Ireland and Britain. Snap-apple, ducking for apples and peel-tossing were all ways to ask who would marry and when. Daniel Maclise painted Snap-Apple Night in 1833 after an Irish Halloween party in Blarney. The peel toss is older than that: John Gay put it in his 1714 mock-pastoral The Shepherd's Week, where a lovesick milkmaid reads an L in her apple peel.
In 1937 to 1939 the Irish Folklore Commission asked schoolchildren to collect local customs. Their notebooks, now online through Dúchas, describe the apple peel test again and again in Halloween essays. Irish and Scottish emigrants brought it to the United States and Canada, and by the 1900s it appeared on mass-printed Halloween postcards, the form most people know today. It is still played at Irish and American Halloween parties.
On midsummer night, unmarried young women weave flower wreaths, often with a candle, and set them on a river. How the wreath floats tells of love and marriage in the year ahead.
On the night of 20 January, a person goes to bed without supper after a small rite with pins and a prayer, hoping to see a future sweetheart in a dream.
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