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.
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.
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 (731–741)
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 is widely
believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of
the dead with a related, but 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 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.
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.
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but
community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured
entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities,
vandalism began to plague Halloween 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. 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.
Today's Halloween Traditions
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.
Halloween Superstitions
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 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.
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, confusingly, 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 good will of the very same "spirits"
whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.
