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The Origins of Halloween

Icon of a pile of books - English Language Arts
Steven Cvetanovich

The Origins of Halloween

By Cassie Calhoun

Holidays come but once a year, and we spend a month leading up to them building anticipation and excitement. Halloween is no different.

With Halloween and October 31 comes the crispy, cool air and trees becoming barren as the ground is covered in red, orange, yellow, and brown leaves. You just got home from trick-or-treating, and you saw people dressing up as scary, murderous clowns in masks of former presidents and unique inflatable costumes.

To end this night, you get into your comfy pajamas and turn on the T.V. to watch a horror movie while eating some of your favorite candy. As you flip through the channels on the T.V., have you ever wondered about the origins of one of our favorite holidays? 

Halloween didn't start as it is now; it was a Celtic festival called "Samhain." The Celts lived around 2,000 years ago in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France. 

Samhain was the Celts' celebration of New Year's, which happened every year on November 1 and marked the end of their summer and harvest and the beginning of winter. To the Celts, it was a common belief that winter was the season of death. Because of this, many Celts' believed that the night before Samhain, the boundary between the dead and the living seasons, spirits of the dead would come up and return to the living realm. 

Celts' believed that these spirits would cause trouble, damaging their crops, but they also thought that these spirits made it easier for their priests, called "druids," to make predictions, which was a source of comfort to the Celts' during the cold winter. 

During Samhain, druids would build huge sacred bonfires. People would unite and celebrate by sacrificing animals and burning crops to give them to Celtic deities. Celts wore costumes of animal heads and skin, and they would attempt to tell one another's fortunes. When the celebration ended, they relight the bonfires that would have been extinguished earlier, and it was believed the bonfire would help protect them from the upcoming winter.

By 43 A.D., most of the Celtic territory was conquered by the Roman Empire, and throughout the Romans' reign over their land, two Roman-origin festivals were combined with the Celtic festival, Samhain. The first festival is Feralia. It was celebrated in late October when Romans commemorated and honored the dead. 

The second festival was to honor a Roman goddess, Pomona. Pomona was the goddess of fruit and trees, and the symbol to recognize her was an apple, which was incorporated into the celebration of Samhain and might be why we practice bobbing for apples for modern Halloween.

Around the 9th century, Christianity spread far and wide, reaching the Celts and influencing them. The tradition of Samhain was eventually combined with Christianity's "All Saints' Day," a holiday that honored martyrs and saints from May 13 to November 1. 

In 1000 A.D., the church declared that November 2 was "All Souls' Day," a day when people would honor the dead, but it was widely believed that the church was trying to replace the Celtic festival with a church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls' Day was similar to Samhain, but it incorporated the only difference in dressing in angel and devil costumes.

Halloween's name originates from All Saints' Day. Along with All Saints' Day, there were other names for the holiday, "All-hallows" or "All-hallowmas." These names originated from the Middle English word for All Saints' Day, "Alholowmesse."  

The day before All Saints' Day, October 31, was the celebration of Samhain in the Celtic religion, which then began to be called All-Hallows Eve, and then it was called the name we know it for today, Halloween.

Halloween didn't originally have a strong start in America, especially in colonial New England, due to predominant Protestant beliefs. Halloween was celebrated more in Maryland and the southern colonies. In areas where Halloween was celebrated, different traditions and customs from European groups and Native Americans were mashed together, and a new kind of Halloween was established. 

Despite being the celebration of the harvest, a new celebration called "play parties" was introduced. These play parties were events where neighbors and friends would come together to tell each other their fortune, share stories of the dead, and sing and dance. They would also tell ghost stories and cause mischief.

These traditions have continued to evolve into what we all look forward to today. Now, get back to your regularly scheduled horror movie…before it's too late.