EDITOR’S NOTE: Information for this article was drawn from various websites.
Halloween is a time of both celebration and superstition - a holiday that is filled with mystery, magic, and fun. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween - making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday.
According to the website History.com, Halloween’s customs are thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhaim, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated Nov. 1 as All Saints’ Day - a time to honor all saints and martyrs - and incorporated some of the traditions of Samhaim. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween.
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 Oct. 31, they celebrated Samhaim, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. To commemorate the event, Druids (Celtic priests) built huge sacred bonfires. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes 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.
During this end-of-summer festival, 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.
As the benefits 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 others’ 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 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.
By the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new people - especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland’s potato famine of 1846 - helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking 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.
By the late 1800’s, Halloween was more of a holiday about community and neighborly get-togethers. 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.
The American Halloween tradition of “trick or treating” probably dates back to the early All Saints 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 promises to pray for the family’s dead relatives. This 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 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. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes after dark so the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spitis. 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.
The centuries-old practice of decorating jack-o-lanterns originated in Ireland, where large turnips and potatoes served as an early canvas. Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, carving scary faces into the turnips and potatoes and placing them in windows or near doors to frighten away wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets were used.
Immigrants from these countries brought the jack-o-lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States, and soon found that pumpkins - a fruit native to America - made perfect jack-o-lanterns. They quickly became an integral part of American Halloween festivities.