Nigel, The idea of burning someone in effigy certainly existed before Guy Fawkes, and it may well originally have symbolized an actual sacrificial burning. The horrors of "The Wicker Man," (in which Edward Woodward was burned alive inside a giant effigy man) were based on accounts of that same practice among the Celts written by Strabo and Caesar, and probably based on a lost source, the writings of Poseidonius. Whether the Celts really did that, we don't know, as we have only the written accounts to go by.

And thank Goodness for Forsh's post. I'm an American, so I thought you were saying you carved out a Swedish person to use as a Jack-O-Lantern! I was glad you didn't recommend eating the insides :-)

Guest, I wasn't saying that Cricket should be scorned for its inauthenticity, merely that to get into an argument about the lexical roots of the word "bonfire," and whether the presence of that word in a Cricket Magazine article meant a Germanic component to Halloween, was silly. The magazine is simply not that accurate. It's fine for kids, but historians shouldn't take it as gospel.

Also, Neolithic and bronze-age sites like Newgrange were built centuries (indeed, millennia) before the Gaelic people came to Ireland, so they have little bearing on the accuracy of Pagan Gaelic/Irish calendars. They may be wonders of engineering, but their secrets could have been entirely lost to the Irish when the Julian calendar was introduced.