Halloween

Harvest Festival

Halloween or Hallowe’en^[7][8] (less commonly known as Allhalloween,^[9] All Hallows’ Eve,^[10] or All Saints’ Eve)^[11] is a celebration observed in many countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day. It is at the beginning of the observance of Allhallowtide,^[12] the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.^{[3][13][14][15]} In popular culture, the day has become a celebration of horror, being associated with the macabre and supernatural.^[16]

One theory holds that many Halloween traditions were influenced by Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain, which are believed to have pagan roots.^{[17][18][19][20]} Some go further and suggest that Samhain may have been Christianized as All Hallow’s Day, along with its eve, by the early Church.^[21] Other academics believe Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, being the vigil of All Hallow’s Day.^{[22][23][24][25]} Celebrated in Ireland and Scotland for centuries, Irish and Scottish immigrants took many Halloween customs to North America in the 19th century,^[26][27] and then through American influence various Halloween customs spread to other countries by the late 20th and early 21st century.^[16][28]

Popular Halloween activities include trick-or-treating (or the related guising and souling), attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins or turnips into jack-o’-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, and watching horror or Halloween-themed films.^[29] Some people practice the Christian observances of All Hallows’ Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead,^[30][31][32] although it is a secular celebration for others.^[33][34][35] Some Christians historically abstained from meat on All Hallows’ Eve, a tradition reflected in the eating of certain vegetarian foods on this vigil day, including apples, potato pancakes, and soul cakes.^{[36][37][38][39]}

Since the time of the early Church,[49] major feasts in Christianity (such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) had vigils that began the night before, as did the feast of All Hallows’.[50][47] These three days are collectively called Allhallowtide and are a time when Western Christians honour all saints and pray for recently departed souls who have yet to reach Heaven.

it is claimed that both Germanic and Celtic-speaking peoples commemorated the dead at the beginning of winter.^[61] They may have seen it as the most fitting time to do so, as it is a time of ‘dying’ in nature.

The Allhallowtide custom of baking and sharing soul cakes for all christened souls,^[65] has been suggested as the origin of trick-or-treating.^[66] The custom dates back at least as far as the 15th century^[67] and was found in parts of England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria.^[68] Groups of poor people, often children, would go door-to-door during Allhallowtide, collecting soul cakes, in exchange for praying for the dead, especially the souls of the givers’ friends and relatives. This was called “souling”.^[67][69][70] Soul cakes were also offered for the souls themselves to eat,^[68] or the ‘soulers’ would act as their representatives.^[71] As with the Lenten tradition of hot cross buns, soul cakes were often marked with a cross, indicating they were baked as alms.^[72] Shakespeare mentions souling in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593).^[73] While souling, Christians would carry “lanterns made of hollowed-out turnips”, which could have originally represented souls of the dead;^[74][75] jack-o’-lanterns were used to ward off evil spirits.^[76][77] On All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day during the 19th century, candles were lit in homes in Ireland,^[78] Flanders, Bavaria, and in Tyrol, where they were called “soul lights”,^[79] that served “to guide the souls back to visit their earthly homes”.^[80] In many of these places, candles were also lit at graves on All Souls’ Day.

Many Christians in mainland Europe, especially in France, believed “that once a year, on Hallowe’en, the dead of the churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival” known as the danse macabre, which was often depicted in church decoration.^[87] Christopher Allmand and Rosamond McKitterick write in The New Cambridge Medieval History that the danse macabre urged Christians “not to forget the end of all earthly things”.^[88] The danse macabre was sometimes enacted in European village pageants and court masques, with people “dressing up as corpses from various strata of society”, and this may be the origin of Halloween costume parties.

Brittanica / History Channel

observance of Halloween is largely nonreligious, celebrated with parties, spooky costumes, jack-o’-lanterns, pumpkin carvings, and the giving of candy. But the holiday also marks the beginning of Allhallotide, a three-day Christian triduum dedicated to remembering the dead that begins with Halloween (October 31) and is followed by All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2).

Halloween had its origins in the festival of Samhain among the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland. On the day corresponding to November 1 on contemporary calendars, the new year was believed to begin. That date was considered the beginning of the winter period, 

People set bonfires on hilltops for relighting their hearth fires for the winter and to frighten away evil spirits

In the 7th century ce Pope Boniface IV established All Saints’ Day, originally on May 13, and in the following century, perhaps in an effort to supplant the pagan holiday with a Christian observance, it was moved to November 1. The evening before All Saints’ Day became a holy, or hallowed, eve, from which the word “Halloween” evolved. By the end of the Middle Ages, the secular and the sacred days had merged. The Reformation essentially put an end to the religious holiday among Protestants, although in Britain especially Halloween continued to be celebrated as a secular holiday. Along with other festivities, the celebration of Halloween was largely forbidden among the early American colonists, although in the 1800s there developed festivals that marked the harvest and incorporated elements of Halloween. When large numbers of immigrants, including the Irish, went to the United States beginning in the mid 19th century, they took their Halloween customs with them, and in the 20th century Halloween became one of the principal U.S. holidays, particularly among children.

As a secular holiday, Halloween has come to be associated with a number of activities. One is the practice of pulling usually harmless pranks. Celebrants wear masks and costumes for parties and for trick-or-treating, thought to have derived from the British practice of allowing the poor to beg for food, called “soul cakes.” Trick-or-treaters go from house to house with the threat that they will pull a trick if they do not receive a treat, usually candy. Halloween parties often include games such as bobbing for apples, perhaps derived from the Roman celebration of Pomona. Along with skeletons and black cats, the holiday has incorporated scary beings such as ghosts, witches, and vampires into the celebration. Another symbol is the jack-o’-lantern, a hollowed-out pumpkin, originally a turnip, carved into a demonic face and lit with a candle inside.

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.

By A.D. 43, 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.

On May 13, A.D. 609, 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 A.D. 1000, 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.

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.

Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the 19th 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.

Halloween Comes to America

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.

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.

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. Over many centuries, the three holidays—All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day and Samhain—essentially merged into one: Halloween. (The Catholic Church still recognizes All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day today, and some Wiccans and Celtic Reconstructionists commemorate Samhain.) 

In England and Ireland during All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day celebrations, poor people would visit the houses of wealthier families and receive pastries called soul cakes in exchange for a promise to pray for the souls of the homeowners’ dead relatives. Known as “souling,” the practice was later taken up by children, who would go from door to door asking for gifts such as food, money and ale—an early form of trick-or-treating. 

Tricks or Treats

Borrowing from European 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 Trivia

• One quarter of all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.
• More people are buying costumes for their pets. Americans spent nearly $500 million on costumes for their pets in 2021—more than double what they spent in 2010.
• The word hallowe[‘]en comes from the Scottish form of All Hallows’ Eve (the evening before All Hallows’ Day):[44] even is the Scots term for “eve” or “evening”,[45] and is contracted to e’en or een;[46] (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en became Hallowe’en.