As time passes by, September moves away, taking summer with it. The days have become shorter and the nights longer. The weather is also colder, giving us the perfect opportunity to drink hot cocoa with marshmallows…but October isn’t only for longer nights and chilly weather. It’s the time of the year when spookiness takes hold, when ghosts, witches, werewolves, and vampires come out to scare us. October is the time when we can dress up and eat all the candy we want on the thirty-first of the month, a holiday known as Halloween. 

But Halloween is not all about candy and dressing up. Nope! It’s actually the best excuse for people to decorate their houses with the wildest stuff without being judged. People decorate their homes with the most extravagant, outstanding, and spooky decorations they can think of. Actually, so many people are going all out in decorations this year to the point where the National Retail Federation calculated that this year's Halloween spending is expected to reach a record $12.2 billion, all around the world. That's a lot of money for a holiday… 

Halloween is ranked to be the ninth biggest holiday to be celebrated around the world in 2023. But some polls suggest that number has actually lowered a significant amount, especially since in 2021, when Halloween was ranked fourth most-celebrated holiday. It’s also interesting that nowadays the United States and Canada are the two countries that celebrate Halloween the most even though the holiday wasn’t created there; it was created in Europe. 

Unfortunately, we aren’t here to talk about how fun Halloween is nowadays. No, we are here to unveil the beginning of this spine-chilling holiday. And how different it was before than how it is today. We’ll also learn about the holiday's creators and how different cultures, religions, and people have influenced Halloween.

Have you ever wondered why a holiday exists? Have you wondered why holidays like Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and many more even began? Halloween has a long history, and it began with a group of people. The Celts were believed to be a collection of different tribes with the same belief and culture, originating from central Europe two thousand years ago and spreading their culture throughout the continent.

Today we’re still not sure what exactly they called themselves; the few pieces of information we have about the Celts mostly came from what other cultures wrote about them. One of the few things we do know about them is that every year on October 31, the Celts would celebrate the end of harvest season. This festival was called Samhain. This night was also celebrated as their New Year, which they believed was a time when the veils between the living and the dead opened and connected the two worlds, letting the spirits of the dead appear and float among us. It is believed that, to ward off spirits, they would set up a large bonfires in hopes that the dead would go back to the spirit world.

But things started to change when the Catholic Church expanded their influence across Europe. The church attracted people into joining Christianity, but many who already celebrated Celtic traditions refused to change their religion and culture. But this changed in the seventeenth century when Pope George II moved All Saints Day from March 13 to November 1, merging Samhain and All Saints Day into one holiday. This change attracted more people to Christianity, growing the religion’s influence. During that time, this merged holiday was known as Hallowmas, which later became Halloween during the twentieth century. The time of celebration was kept the same: It started the thirty-first of October and ended on the first of November. And the most captivating part of Halloween was how it merged a common element of All Saints Day and Samhain: a focus on death, the afterlife, and spirits. 

This holiday spread throughout many European countries and the rest of the world, arriving in America in 1840 with Irish immigrants after the Potato Famine. Most Americans were forbidden from celebrating this holiday, but some did indulge. The Irish brought their own customs of the holiday including bobbing for apples and making harmless pranks, which were the beginning of today’s trick-or-treating. Children who did these pranks would wear masks and trick their neighbors. But then things changed in the 1930s when the pranks became outright vandalism. People would go around destroying homes and scaring their neighbors, so to stop these outrageous acts, people offered the children candy. This was the beginning of what we know as trick-or-treating. People could either give them candy or get pranked/vandalized. Eventually, this encouraged other children to go around asking for candy on Halloween, and now it's a popular and common tradition.

Halloween is a tradition that has come from a variety of religions and cultures. It’s a holiday that has included traditions that were harmless and interesting to outright dangerous pranks during the nineteenth century. But at the end of the day, Halloween is a day when we can enjoy ourselves and spend time with our loved ones. As we eat candy and play harmless pranks on each other. 

FUN FACTS

Carving Jack-o'-Lanterns:

When the Irish came to America they brought many of their traditions with them including carving Jack-o'-Lanterns. But instead of using pumpkins like we do today, they used turnips. This all started because of a legend about a man called Stinky Jack. In this story, Jack would repeatedly trap the devil with the goal to make a deal with him. He would tell the devil that he would let him go if the devil promised that Jack wouldn’t go to hell. The devil would agree, but later on when Jack died, he would come to the cruel realization that heaven didn’t want him and that he couldn’t enter hell either. This forced Jack to wander around the earth as a spirit with nowhere to go. The devil gave Jack a burning lump of coal in a carved-out turnip to light his way. Locals eventually began carving scary faces into their own turnips to frighten away evil spirits or spooky ghosts like Jack!

Customs:

The Celts had a tradition of wearing scary costumes to ward off spirits from their homes during the Samhain and to also prevent people from mistaking them for spirits. 

Halloween Colors: 

Halloween's main colors are black and orange. This originated from the Celtics who would use black to represent the death of summer. Orange represents the harvest season.

Pranking: 

Pranking didn’t come from a certain place. This pre-halloween tradition was known as the Devil’s Night. It was said that it all started as part of the May Day celebration but later was incorporated into Samhain and eventually All Souls Day as a good-natured mischievous tradition. Later, this tradition was brought to America as part of Halloween by the Irish and Scottish immigrants. 

Bats: 

During Halloween we might observe that many decorations are bat-themed. This all started because of the Celts. When they lit up the bonfires, it attracted insects, which later attracted bats, so bats were later recognized as part of the Samhain Festival. But people and their crazy ideas started to theorize that bats were harbingers of death...

Works Cited

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