If you don’t like Halloween, we can’t be friends. I don’t care if you celebrate with a drunken costume party, pumpkin carving, door-to-door begging for candy, or a more personal observance like watching horror movies alone, but respect must be given to the most awesome of all holidays. But where did Halloween come from and how did it come to resemble the modern holiday we celebrate today?
The origins of Halloween are surprisingly slippery. October 31 is next at a Christian religious holiday, and it’s around “harvest time”, which could usually explain the date, but no one really knows why we put on costumes and beg for candy. There are a ton of theories describing how modern Halloween practices might have stemmed from various ancient traditions, religious rites, or folk practices, but the first direct evidence of anything resembling modern “Halloween” isn’t from the 1800s, and even then, it didn’t really take off for another 100 years.
Put succinctly, the history of Halloween as we know it is a muddy and confusing set of practices that probably owe more to Peanuts comic books published in the 1950s than to medieval Catholicism or pagan rites.
The theoretical history of Halloween
The most oft-repeated Halloween origin story says that the holiday began with the Samhain (pronounced sah-win or sow-in) celebrations of the Celts in Ireland, England, and northern France. The date November 1 or October 31 is roughly halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, and 9th-century Irish literature describes gatherings and festivals marking Samhain, the day when the ancient barrows were opened, and with them, the portals to the Otherworld, the land of the Gods and the dead. Later, the theory goes, these practices were Christianized, renamed “All Hallow’s Day” and “All Hallow’s Eve” by the early Church, and that’s where we get Halloween. This seems quite plausible…
…but that’s probably not what happened. The idea that Halloween comes from pagan rituals usurped by Christians originated with Welsh scholar Sir John Rhŷs, and he didn’t back up his theory with a ton of evidence. Some modern historians argue that the links between Celtic celebrations and early Christian practices are tenuous, and that medieval Christian festivals provide the real plan for the holidays. Medieval Christians celebrated the days of All Souls and All Souls with the celebration of Allhallowtide – the time of the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead – by holding community feasts, focusing on dead souls, and decorating skeletons. But they didn’t get that from the Celts, at least according to the theory.
Regardless, All Souls Day and Samhain likely have deeper roots than written historical records. Harvest festivals were common in many places, and perhaps they resembled Halloween parties, but maybe that wasn’t the case. We don’t know. The festival occurs at the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, a time between life and death, when pagan and Christian minds turn toward the inevitable end of things. Halloween traditions seem to pay homage to this “in-between” place, and while we don’t know how much the ancients celebrated “halfway between the solstice and the equinox,” it probably wasn’t by dressing up in costumes and begging for treats.
Verified Halloween History
No matter where it began, in 835 AD, All Saints’ Day (November 1) became an official Catholic day of obligation, and Allhallowtide practices like ringing church bells for the souls in purgatory and black-clad criers taking to the streets to remind people to think of the dead are a little Like Halloween. If you squint.
Another tradition of the time was to prepare “soul cakes” in memory of the dead. This led to “souling”, where groups of children would travel from house to house asking for cakes in exchange for prayers for the dead. Later souls also carried carved lanterns made from hollowed out turnips. Is this the origin of “Trick or Treat” and Jack o’ Lanterns? Maybe…but then again, probably not. It does not appear that drunken children wore costumes, although “guising” or “mumming” (dressing up in costumes and bothering one’s neighbors for treats and/or money) was practiced in various places in Europe during this period. other holidays, especially around Christmas.
Another theory about the origin of Halloween costumes has its origins in late medieval French tradition. Macabre Dance– the dance of death. Perhaps in response to the Black Death ravaging Europe, 14th-century artists would have depicted the personification of death surrounded by the figures of a pope, emperor, king, child, and worker – people from all levels of society – dancing towards the grave. Live versions of the Danse Macabre were performed at village shows, no doubt to everyone’s delight and horror. The grotesque yet comical spectacle reminded people that death will come for everyone, but also that we should have as much fun as possible before the inevitable, and that there’s nothing more “Halloween” than that. But again, this is just a theory.
The origins of Halloween in America
In colonial America, Halloween was not widely observed. While New England Puritans generally disapproved of anything fun like wearing costumes, dancing with Death, or carving pumpkins, more liberal settlers from New York, Maryland, and further south may have brought Halloween-type activities over the ocean from their villages in Germany or Ireland. We don’t really know, but aside from a few groups of diehards, maybe celebrating Halloween wasn’t a thing in the United States or Europe until the late 1800s.
The first American expression of Halloween-type activities held in late October or early November came in the form of “play parties,” or fall festivals, to celebrate the harvest. These gatherings, immortalized in Washington Irving’s horror tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollowoften included ghost stories, divination attempts, moving apples, pranks, and attempts to scare people – proto-Halloween activities, where you can see the holiday taking shape.
What do you think of it so far?
It wasn’t until the mass Irish immigration of the 19th century that we saw Halloween celebrations labeled as such. Beginning in the 1850s, Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine descended on the country. These immigrants brought Halloween celebrations to the United States, but it does not appear that they brought Halloween costumes or treats.
Possible origins of trick-or-treating
All of our modern ideas that Halloween traditions come from this or that ancient practice could be examples of hand-picked data to support the conclusion that our modern Halloween traditions to have a deep lineage in the first place. But what happens if they don’t?
The Halloween Party is the most well-known expression of Halloween, but, despite historical examples of costumed revelers and/or people going door to door begging for treats during the holiday, there does not appear to be an event. direct link between these ancient practices and modern treatment. Yes, it’s a bit like souling, but no one in America seems to have ever done souling. There is no evidence that anyone wore costumes for Halloween in the United States, United Kingdom, or Ireland before 1900, leading some Halloween scholars to suggest that American children developed costume wearing. independently of any older tradition. It’s actually the coolest theory: American kids invented Halloween from scratch.
The first mention of collecting Halloween candy in costume came from a Kingston, Ontario newspaper in 1911, but the practice remained obscure enough that there was no mention of anything similar in Ruth Edna Kelley’s 1919 story of the holiday, The Halloween Book, and none of the many Halloween postcards printed in the 1920s contained candy. The practice does not appear to have been widespread until the late 1930s, when the first mentions of it were made in a national publication, and it didn’t really take off until the early 1950s, when it appeared in a Peanuts comic strip and a Disney cartoon.
From there, everything we call “Halloween” comes into play: the ghosts, the parties, the scares, the candy, all evolving from comic books, movies, candy company ad campaigns, and regular people who really seem to enjoy dressing up in costumes.
Halloween: the people’s holiday
Ultimately, we don’t know much about the origin of Halloween, because its meaning and the way we celebrate it are constantly changing: it was once a holiday celebrating the harvest, during which people read each other’s fortunes; then it became a day for the children to go trick-or-treating; then adults started using it as an excuse to dress up in sexy Martha Washington costumes and get drunk. Parents are afraid of razor blades in candy and invent “truest or treat”; overambitious suburbanites began transforming their homes into elaborate ghost houses; and so on. No ancient pagan rituals are necessary, people just need to discover what works for them.
Many other major holidays are rooted in religion or intended to commemorate a specific historical event: these are top-down holidays, where the pope or government has decreed that everyone would have a day off on a specific date and observe it in that specific way. But Halloween is people vacation, so there is no official list of rules telling us how we will supposed to commemorate it, or even for any reason why we should I’m going to celebrate it. But every year we do it anyway, perhaps because of a collective desire to buy candy or do something fancy before it gets too cold to go outside.
