The History of Halloween

Halloween for most Americans is a holiday filled with cheesy costumes and candy. People gather around to watch horror movies and decorate their houses with plastic monsters. But years ago, Halloween was very different than it is today. Halloween originated from a pagan religious festival called Samhain, which was based on Celtic traditions. It was one of the four quarterly fire festivals, occurring between the fall equinox and winter solstice. Citizens would go complete the year's harvest, attend a community fire with priests in which they lit a wheel to represent the sun, and sacrifice cattle. They also wore costumes to repel ghosts, as people who celebrated this holiday believed that, during it, the veil between the spirit and physical world break down. Therefore, they prepared offerings outside of the village for Celtic mythological creatures.

Years later, Pope Gregory III declared November 1st a time to honor all saints, and All Saints Day ended up including a few of the traditions of Samhain. Because the All Saints' Day celebration was known as All-hallows, the day before was titled All Hallows Eve, which eventually morphed into Halloween.

For years, Halloween was primarily a European tradition. It was celebrated some in the southern colonies of America at the time, but the popularity didn't kick in until after the Irish Potato Famine when America got a new wave of immigrants.

One of the most popular Halloween traditions, trick-or-treating, was also borrowed from Europe. Americans began putting on costumes and going door-to-door asking for food or money, but this eventually molded into candy. The 'trick' in trick-or-treating comes in part from young women who performed tricks with household objects to discover the identity of their future spouse, such as throwing an apple peel over your shoulder to reveal the initial of your soulmate. In the late 1800s, Americans decided to turn Halloween into a holiday more about community and friendly gatherings than monsters and magic. Regardless, Halloween remains full of aspects of magic and superstitious traditions, like avoiding crossing paths with a black cat.

By the early 1900s, Halloween had become a huge holiday with parades and parties held by entire towns. Unfortunately, vandalism also became very popular at these celebrations around this time. Trick-or-treating was revived as well by families who wanted to prevent having tricks played on them by giving the neighborhood children candy. As television rolled around, ghost stories by the fire began to be replaced by slasher movies that, to many today, seem poorly made.

Although Halloween started very differently than it is today, it has still been impacted and changed over time with culture, eventually becoming the spooky holiday people now know and love.