Halloween
Halloween is an annual holiday
celebrated each year on October 31, and Halloween 2019 occurs on Thursday,
October 31. It originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when
people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth
century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints;
soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The
evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time,
Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving
jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating sweet treats.
Ancient Origins of Halloween
Halloween’s origins date back to
the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who
lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and
northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the
end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a
time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on
the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living
and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated
Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In
addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence
of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests,
to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the
volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort
and direction during the long, dark winter. To commemorate the event, Druids
built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals
as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore
costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell
each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth
fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred
bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
Did you know? One quarter of all
the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.
By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had
conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that
they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with
the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in
late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the
dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and
trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this
celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples
that is practiced today on Halloween.
All Saints' Day
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope
Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs,
and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western
church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as
well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the
9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where
it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the
church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely
believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of
the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls’ Day was
celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in
costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also
called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning
All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in
the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually,
Halloween.
Halloween Comes to America
The celebration of Halloween was
extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant
belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the
southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic
groups and the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of
Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,”
which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share
stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial
Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and
mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual
autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere
in the country. In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was
flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of
Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of
Halloween nationally.
History of Trick-or-Treating
Borrowing from Irish and English
traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house
asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s
“trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could
divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with
yarn, apple parings or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America
to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly
get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the
century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common
way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and
festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders
to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations.
Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and
religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Halloween Parties
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween
had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide
Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of
many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in
many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully
limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at
the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby
boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where
they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the
centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating
was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween
celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them
by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. Thus, a new American
tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an
estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second
largest commercial holiday after Christmas.
Halloween Movies
Speaking of commercial success,
scary Halloween movies have a long history of being box office hits. Classic
Halloween movies include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 original
film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee
Curtis, and Tony Moran. In “Halloween,” a young boy named Michael Myers murders
his 17-year-old sister and is committed to jail, only to escape as a teen on
Halloween night and seek out his old home, and a new target. Considered a classic horror film down to its
spooky soundtrack, it inspired eleven other films in the franchise and other
“slasher films” like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13.”
More family-friendly Halloween movies include “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare
Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”
All Souls Day and Soul Cakes
The American Halloween tradition
of “trick-or-treating” probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades
in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and
families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their
promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes
was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of
leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to
as “going a-souling,” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the
houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money. The tradition of
dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds
of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often
ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter
were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts
came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts
if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people
would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would
mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their
houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the
ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.
Halloween Folk Legends
Halloween has always been a
holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic
end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased
relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the
dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit
candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today’s
Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our
customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black
cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the
Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by
turning themselves into black cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the
same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who
believed that triangles were sacred (it also may have something to do with the
fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around
Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in
the road or spilling salt.
Halloween Matchmaking and
Lesser-Known Rituals
But what about the Halloween
traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about?
Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and
the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping
young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would
someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a
matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping
to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers
recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her
suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes
rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future
husband. (In some versions of this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that
burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if
a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg
before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young
women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall
on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn
about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and
stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over
their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more competitive.
At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt
would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would
be the first down the aisle. Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic
advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween
superstitions relies on the goodwill of the very same “spirits” whose presence
the early Celts felt so keenly.
