Halloween is right around the corner and everyone is preparing costumes and planning parties. Often, while attaching horns to my head or covering myself in fake blood, I have wondered why we do this every year. Obviously because it’s fun, but what is the reason we started celebrating this way in the first place? Well, I found out and I shall now teach you because I am the master teacher and I have decided that this is what you want to learn today.
It is believed that Halloween started as a Celtic tradition 2000 years ago. It was originally a festival called "Samhain" celebrated on October 31st. The Celts would celebrate their new year on November 1st. This date was the end of summer and the harvesting season and the start of a dark and very cold winter. Winter for the Celts was largely associated with human death. They believed that on the night of October 31st the boundary between the living and the dead became blurred. On Samhain, the ghosts of the dead could return to Earth.
Not only did they believe that the spirits caused a lot of trouble and damage to crops, they believed that the spirits being present made it easier for Celtic priests and Druids to make predictions about the future. This provided a sense of comfort to most and gave them a sense of hope and direction for the long winter.
To celebrate this the Druids would light huge bonfires in which the people would burn crops and animal sacrifices to the Deities. They would wear costumes, mostly made from animal heads and skins, in order to help predict each other’s futures and fortunes.
After this major celebration, they would take fire from the bonfire to re-light their hearth fires. They believed this would protect them from the cold winter they were about to endure.
In 43 A.D. the Roman Empire had conquered most of the Celtic territory. It is during this time that two Roman festivals were combined the Celtic Samhain.
The first of these was the festival of Feralia which was celebrated late October and commemorated the passing of the dead.
The second was the day they honoured Pomona, the Roman Goddess of fruits and trees. Pomona was most often portrayed with the symbol of an apple and it has been long speculated that this is where the Halloween tradition of “bobbing for apples” originated from.
Moving on to 1000 A.D, the catholic church made November 2nd "All Soul’s Day" which was celebrated similarly to the way that Samhain was. Many believed that this was the church's attempt to replace Samhain with a church-sanctioned holiday. All Soul’s Day was often referred to as "All-Hallows" or "All-Hallowmas". The night before was called "All-Hallows Eve" which through the ages became “Hallowe’en” and eventually “Halloween”.
It wasn’t until the second century that the Halloween tradition started to emerge in America. With the Irish fleeing to America, Halloween started to be popularised in the country. Some of the Halloween traditions at that time included young women trying to impress and secure their future husbands with yarn trick and apple pairings which became what is known today as “trick-or-treating”. With a lot of the original superstitions and religious overtones being forgotten, the festival started being associated with bringing people in the community together.
These days Halloween is pretty much only associated with candy and dress-up parties. Almost all of the original traditions have been forgotten, and as time goes by it seems that Halloween is being celebrated less and less throughout the world. Which leaves me with a burning question. How long until we have forgotten Halloween entirely?
