Halloween Food... and bats

One of the things that defines many festivals are the foods that go along with it.  Christmas has cake, pudding and Yule Log (to name a few); Easter has eggs (obviously!); birthdays have cake with candles...

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that Halloween too has some foods that I will always associate with it.  For as long as I can remember, my family have made "Dustbread Biscuits" on Halloween:

"Dustbread" is actually just gingerbread.  Instead of cutting them into nice and friendly shapes, they are made into bats, skulls, pumpkins and bones.  Actually, they're enormous and pretty much a meal in themselves.

Symbolism is also important in any festival (major festivals like Christmas would be unrecognisable without it) and so the decision to make gingerbread skulls/bats/pumpkins/bones is a clue to some of the symbols of that season.  

Skulls is understandable enough - pumpkins (or turnips in some areas) are supposed to resemble skulls and, in a festival remembering the dead, it's hardly surprisingly to find an image that reminds us all of our own mortality.  Bearing this in mind, bones and pumpkins are also almost predictable as symbols of Halloween.

But bats?  I've never really questioned it before, but what exactly do bats have to do with Halloween?  I'll hazard a guess that it's because they're creatures of darkness.  Back when Halloween was Samhain, before the advent of Christianity, the festival was designed to mark the beginning of winter.  The daylight was swiftly being consumed by a long darkness and so creatures that appreciate the dark - like bats - were suddenly much more visible.

This, in turn, led to bat being associated with witchcraft - they fly quickly and silently and, in the right light, can seem to flicker between visibility and invisibility.  

In the questionnaire I have produced, I've asked people if they think that a bat is a symbol of Halloween so, given the above thoughts, it will be interesting to see how that question is answered.