Halloween is one the oldest holidays still celebrated today, but it didn’t always look like it does now. It’s been around for 2,000 years and taken several forms, from grim celebration, to thoughtful holy day, to upbeat family-fun megaholiday. For many, Halloween is simply a day with candy, costumes, and a weird name.
Well, that weird name means something. Unfortunately, the same can’t really be said for sure about the candy and costumes. Let’s get into the history.
Way back in the day, the Celtic people practiced a holiday called Samhain (I dare you to look up the pronunciation) on Oct 31. Samhain represented the end of summer and the start of winter. In other words, it was at the beginning of a period with much loss of human life for the ancient Celtics, due to the cold and lack of food. Because of this, on Samhain it was believed that the barrier grew thin between the world of the humans and the world of the dead and various monsters. Samhain was also closely related to the harvest and probably resembled modern-day harvest festivals in many respects. Although it was a party, it’s important to recognize that Samhain was a day of great cultural significance for the Celtics. It also functioned as a meeting of Celtic leaders for hundreds of years.
When Christianity came to the Celtics, the holiday was adopted by the Church in the mid 8th century. The holiday was renamed from Samhain to All Saints Day and moved to Nov 1. All Saints Day – also called All Hallow’s Day – was about remembering and praying for the departed who were in purgatory. Many years passed and All Saints’ Day evolved into a period of three days called Hallowtide: All Hallow’s Eve, on Oct, 31, All Hallow’s Day the day after, and finally All Souls’ Day the day after that. All Hallow’s Eve was also called Halloween.
At this point, Hallowtide was entirely associated with the Christian church. It was a time of prayer and thoughtful remembrance of the dearly departed; the raucous festival nature of Samhain had been replaced for the most part, although there was still celebration. The only similarities between modern Halloween and what existed at the time are the date, the name, and something called “souling,” which was like a cross between trick-or-treating and caroling. Children would go around knocking on doors, singing, and asking for treats such as ale (different times). However, kids would do this on all holy days, not just All Hallow’s Eve. Today, only Halloween and Christmas retain hints of the practice of souling.
At this point we’re still hundreds of years from 2024, but we’re now in the home stretch. Remember, to become the Halloween of today, it still has to cross the Atlantic and almost entirely change in nature. When Halloween arrived on the East Coast in colonial times, it was stripped of pretty much all of its Catholic elements by the mainly Protestant U.S. This was the beginning of Halloween’s transformation into a commercial holiday. This phenomenon continued with Halloween losing most of its British and Irish elements as American pride got rolling. Eventually, Halloween had almost no traditional practices left, although that’s not to say Americans didn’t appreciate the holiday. They, like most cultures, had a healthy appreciation for the time at the end of the harvest. Thus began the whole obsession with corn and pumpkins.
During the Potato Famine in Ireland, a lot of Irish immigrants came to the U.S. and brought back some of the partying vibes in a strange twist of fate. The echoes of Samhain sounded again and in a sense, Halloween regained some of its mischief. This manifested itself in trick-or-treating style pranks. Add the rise of the horror genre to all of this, along with the newly minted suburbs wanting something fun to do at harvest time, and you get trick-or-treating and costume parties. The costume industry deserves its own article, but, in a few words, it blew up. Same goes for the candy industry, and there we go. All caught up.
Hopefully now we all have a more nuanced view of Halloween and its origins. And to add a quick disclaimer: There is a lot that has been left out of this article. Even the few countries that have been mentioned so far have centuries of complex history, so if this topic is interesting to you, I would encourage you to treat this article as an introduction rather than a summary and pursue your own research.
The Axe 