History of Halloween

Halloween is a patchwork holiday stitched together with cultural, religious and occult traditions that spans centuries. Halloween can be traced back to a 2000 year old Celtic festival called “Samhain” that essentially celebrated death and rebirth and happened at the end of the summer harvest. This word actually means “summer’s end” in Gaelic.  The Celts, who lived in what is now Ireland, Scotland, the UK, and parts of Northern Europe, based their calendar on the wheel of a year which was divided into two halves, the light and the dark. The festival celebrated the divide of the two halves of the year of summer/winter and light/dark and the dead/living.

During this time the veil between the living world and the spiritual world was at its thinnest allowing spirits to pass through and for the spirits of the Dead to roam freely in their towns and villages. The Celts were afraid that these ghosts could harm them by damaging their crops, possessing people and spreading incurable diseases. They believed that by dressing up in costumes that they would blend in with the real ghosts roaming the streets and would be Safe.

With most of the Celtic land being conquered by Rome in 43 BC the Romans had their own holidays that marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. One of those celebrations honored Pomona the Roman goddess of harvested foods such as apples and nuts. The Romans also celebrated a festival called Feralia a holiday that honored the memory of those who had died. In time, the three celebrations merged with the Celtic traditions.

As the Catholic Church’s influence grew in Europe it frowned on the Celtic pagan rituals like Samhain. In the 7^th century the Vatican began to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday. So November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor martyrs and the deceased. Essentially, instead of honoring pagan gods and mischievous spirits, they now celebrated Christian figures. This day is also known as All Hallows Day where “Hallow” means Holy person. Samhain or summer’s end also started to become called All Hallows Eve because it is the evening before the All Hallows day. The word Halloween comes from the words “Hallow” (meaning Holy person) and “een”, deriving as a contraction of eve. As the day’s popularity increased over time it became called Halloween.

Halloween evolved as a more secular version of All Hallows’ Eve, and eventually it would become more popular and common practice than All Saints Day. While Halloween has its origins in the British Isles, there’s a great disparity in its popularity in former British colonies. The Puritans who came to colonize America were Protestant and did not celebrate holidays of the Catholic church, as they were believed to lead to idolatry. In the early days of the American colonies, celebrations of Halloweens were mostly forbidden as they were deemed top pagan or too Catholic by the Protestant colonizers. Though elements of it began to incorporate into secular harvest related events in the 1800s. The mid 19th century saw a large influx of immigrants entering the country,

The holiday came to America with the wave of Irish immigrants during the potato famine of the 1840s and they brought several of their holiday customs with them including Halloween. In the middle of the twentieth century the festival became a hugely celebrated children’s holiday and now it’s more like a community celebration in cities and towns all over the United States. New York City has an annual Halloween parade which brings over two million people to it and it has more than 50,000 people that dress for the parade.

Happy Halloween from Flippysox!

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