This evening we will go out into our local communities for the time-honored tradition of trick-or treating.
By 4:13 pm, your sibling gets home eager to go put on his or her halloween costume and impatiently waits for when you or your parents are ready to take him or her to Candy Land.
After what seems like an eternity, your sibling finally hits the pavement. The street is full of eager kids running back and forth from house to house using lit pumpkins to find their way. Within each group, an incredible costume or two stands out. A flock of kids jump up and down as they discover that one house that’s giving out full-size candy bars. Holograms shift against the side of a house, while creepy music plays in the background.
The clock hits 7:00 p.m., and you tell your sibling just one more stop. You sit back and enjoy the scene. The pure joy on trick-or-treaters’ faces is contagious. It’s a special time of year.
However, did you ever think about why we celebrate this holiday?
Here’s some insight to where it all came from.
Halloween originated from the Celtic festival of Samhain. The Samhain Festival was celebrated on October 31st, when it was believed that the ghost of the dead returned to earth. On the day of the Samhain Festival, people lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward off ghosts. The festival also marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of a dark, cold winter. The festival was also believed to have been associated with human death. The Celts also thought the presence of spirits made it easier for Druids or priests to make predictions about the future.
Costumes or trick-or-treating weren’t initially the norm in America. Halloween started out as “play parties.” A play party is a public event held to celebrate the harvest. Residents of Maryland celebrated Halloween in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Halloween evolved into a holiday across the country. According to History.com, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest holiday after Christmas.
When the Irish came to America, Halloween evolved again. We combined our traditions with each other. Some of the Irish traditions were halloween costumes, blind dates, and bonfires. People started to go house to house asking for food and money. It wasn’t until the 1950s that they changed this to giving kids candy because they thought it would stop most of the pranks.
Now we all know about the traditions we do for Halloween, but why do we do these traditions? Bobbing for apples, dressing up, carving pumpkins, decorations, parties, pulling pranks, haunted houses, and telling scary stories- they all came from different cultures.
Jack-o-lanterns are now used to decorate the outside of your house, but way back when, they were used to ward off evil spirits. Black cats supposedly bring bad luck, but back in the old days, people thought that the black cat was a gift from Satan. (Fortunately, we now know this is not true.)
Have you ever thought about why we have the colors orange and black to celebrate Halloween? We have the color orange to represent the harvest, and we have the color black to represent death. The reason these two colors are for Halloween is because it’s the end of the harvest, and it’s believed that the boundary between the world of the living and the dead became blurred.
We all know and love haunted houses. Every year, people put up attractions for people to go and see. Haunted houses started in the late 19th century in London. Currently in the U.S, there are over 1,200 professional haunted houses.
Wonder why we eat what we eat on Halloween? Traditionally, we serve apples, soul cakes, chocolate, and candy corn. We eat apples on Halloween because it comes in the wake with the apple harvest. We eat soul cakes because it is to commemorate the dead in the Christian tradition.
So now you know a little bit more about the origins of Halloween and where it came from. Enjoy the evening and have a Happy Halloween!