Halloween: History of the Holiday
Posted on August 13, 2008
Filed Under Holidays |
Halloween is a traditional celebration held on October 31st. Today, Halloween is an excuse for Halloween theme costume parties, and entertainment with horror films, haunted houses and other activities around the popular themes of ghosts, witches, Dracula, werewolves and the supernatural. Children love to dress up in halloween costumes and go from door-to-door in their neighborhood following the old tradition of trick-or-treating, collecting sweets and gifts, sometimes money.
Halloween began as an ancient Celtic festival in Great Britain and Ireland, and has survived most strongly among Irish, Scottish and Welsh communities. Immigrants from these communities carried the tradition to North America where it has gained in popularity. In turn, as part of American pop culture, Halloween has spread in popularity to most corners of the English speaking western world, and increasingly into Western Europe in recent times.
Originally Halloween was a pagan festival, around the idea of linking the living with the dead, when contact became possible between the spirits and the physical world, and magical things were more likely to happen. Like most pagan festivals, long ago it was absorbed into the festivals of the expanding Christian church, and became associated with All Hallows Day, or All Saints Day, which eventually fell on November 1 under the Gregorian calendar.
On the evening of October 31, All Hallows Evening, a vigil was held for the following day’s celebrations. All Hallows Evening was eventually referred to as Hallowe’en and finally the Halloween that is celebrated throughout the world.
Ireland is where traditional Halloween celebrations have remained the strongest. There, children would traditionally dress as supernatural creatures, getting stores of nuts, fruit, and sweets from neighbors that would be used in the celebrations. Each town celebrated the end of summer by getting together and setting a large bonfire in order to protect them all from evil spirits.
These were used for playing traditional games like eating an apple on a string or bobbing for apples and other gifts in a basin of water, without using your hands. Salt might be sprinkled on the visiting children to ward off evil spirits. Carving turnips as ghoulish faces to hold candles became a popular part of the festival, which has been adapted to carving pumpkins in America.
There is no exact explanation of how the trickery of trick-or-treating arose, but it did so in North America. Children in Ireland often did mischievous things during Halloween that would later be blamed on the bad spirits. It seems that this tradition was merged with that of collecting treats.
Kids usually played innocent and clever tricks on adults they didn’t like so much, putting commonly used objects of theirs where they couldn’t be found on the night of Halloween.
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