SOME SAY the custom of bobbing for apples dates all the way back
to pre-Christian Ireland and the pagan festival of Samhain,
though there's little documentary evidence to support this.
Apple bobbing also been popularly associated with Pomona, the
ancient Roman goddess of fruits, trees, and gardens in whose
honor a festival was supposedly held each year on November
first. But that, too, stands on shaky historical ground,
apparently, as some question whether such a festival ever
actually existed. We can say with more certainty that the game
of apple bobbing goes back at least a few hundred years, that it
originated in the British Isles (Ireland and Scotland in
particular), and that it originally had something to do with
fortune telling. British author W. H. Davenport Adams, who
attributed belief in the prognosticative power of apples to "old
Celtic fairy lore," described the game as follows in his 1902
book, Curiosities of Superstition: [The apples] are thrown into
a tub of water, and you endeavour to catch one