Halloween is an annual holiday celebrated each year on October 31, and
Halloween 2018 occurs on Wednesday, 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
four hundred 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 the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make 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
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 as well as the American Indians meshed, a
distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first
celebrations included “play parties,” public events held to celebrate the
harvest, where 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.
Trick-or-Treat
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.
Read more: Who Invented Candy Corn?
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.
Black Cats
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
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.