Arts & Life

Trick-or-Treating you to a little Halloween history

Our parents dressed us up as princesses or superheroes and paraded us around town as we filled pillowcases with candy that we never wanted to share with our siblings. We would spend hours, even days, formulating the perfect costume. As we grew, our costumes became more ironic and clever, or in some cases, more revealing.

The origins of Thanksgiving were beat into our skulls during the first half of our primary school years. Yet, somehow we knew nothing of Halloween. There isn’t a doubt that Hollywood, Willy Wonka and the film industry have capitalized on the holiday, but where did the tradition actually originate?

According to American Folklorist Jack Santino, Nov. 1 corresponds with the beginning of winter and the start of a new year in the Celtic culture.

“The date marked both an ending and a beginning of an eternal cycle,” Santino wrote, in reference to the Celts’ pastoralist subsistence practice in which they secured their livestock as well as harvested and stored their crops for the cold months ahead. The imagery of the autumn harvest is a tradition still reflected in pumpkin carving and apple-bobbing.

On the eve of Nov. 1, the eve that we now recognize as Halloween, the people celebrated a festival called Samhain (Sah-ween), which simply means “Summer’s End.” The Celts believed that on this eve, spirits of those who had deceased during the past year year traveled from the ground to the otherworld, allowing the living and the dead to mingle for the night. In celebration, the Celtic people gathered to sacrifice animals and light fires to guide the spirits on their journey and keep them away from the living, according to Santino.

The transformation into what is now know as Halloween, although still under dispute, is said to have begun with Christian missionaries’ attempts to discredit the pagan holiday and its devilish associations with the spirit world.

According to American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, in 601 A.D., Pope Gregory I issued an edict in attempt to convert native peoples’ beliefs. In his Letter to Abbot Mellitus, Pope Gregory said that in order to deal with pagan culture and its symbols, such as the Samhain festival, missionaries should not destroy the worshipped idols but rather, “purify them with holy water,” consecrating them instead to Jesus Christ and allowing the pagans to continue worship.

“The spirits associated with Samhain, once thought to be wild and powerful, were now taught to be something worse — they were evil,” according to American Folklore: An Encyclopedia.

According to History.com, Christians made the holiday their own, designating Nov. 1 as All Saints’ Day and the following day All Souls’ Day. These days were originally designated to replace Samhain and its sacrilegious spirituality. According to Santino, many Celts abandoned some traditional pagan beliefs for the beliefs pressed upon them by the missionaries, although fascination for life after death never seemed to die out.

“Powerful symbolism of the traveling dead was too strong, and perhaps too basic to the human psyche, to be satisfied with the … more abstract Catholic feast honoring saints,” Santino said.

All Saints’ Day adopted the name “All Hallows,” meaning “holy.” The night before was All Hallows Eve, the time for human and supernatural activity. Those who held onto an inkling of the original tradition held that souls of the dead were unleashed, appeased by gifts of food and drink left outside by villagers, according to Santino.

The American Folklore: An Encyclopedia said that in spirit of the Christian-fabricated tale of the free-roaming and malicious entities, people during the Celtic period practiced “mumming.” Mumming was when people dressed up like ghastly creatures and performed antics for homeowners in exchange for the food and drink they left out for the demons and souls of the dead.

According to Santino, the name “All Hallows Eve” semantically shifted to Hallow evening, and the phrase was blended into the Celtic “Hallow’en.”

According to History.com, when North America was flooded with Irish and English immigrants, Halloween pervaded the traditions of the colonies, restricted in the more pious areas and celebrated freely in the more liberal southern colonies.

However, the origin of trick-or-treating is still disputed. According to BBC, “mischief night,” an evening of pranks closely following Halloween, now mainly celebrated in Northern England, traveled overseas to the states during British colonization. Modern trick-or-treating reflects a combination of the classic mischief and the Celtic “mumming.”

While over-consumption of confections and pricey attire are the main associations with Halloween, this influx of different traditions is mixed into what we now know and love as the Americanized Halloween.

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