American Legendary Stories

                                                  Origin Of  Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived two,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom & northern France, celebrated their new year on November one. This day marked the finish of summer & the harvest & the beginning of the dark, chilled winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living & the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble & damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it simpler for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort & direction in the work of the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built immense sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops & animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. In the coursework of the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, usually consisting of animal heads & skins, & tried to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them in the coursework of the approaching winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered all of Celtic territory. In the work of the hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans historicallyin the past commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration in to Samhain probably explains the custom of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pontiff Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pontiff Gregory III (731 to 741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November one. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread in to Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November two All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was trying to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with large bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Hollowness meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, finally, Halloween.


Halloween Comes to America

Celebration of Halloween was very limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share tales of the dead, tell each others fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost tales and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated in every single place in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or funds, a practice that finally became today's "trick-or-treat" custom. Young females believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween in to a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both kids and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of plenty of schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in plenty of communities in the work of this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved in to a holiday directed chiefly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young kids in the work of the fifties kid boom, parties moved from town civic centers in to the classroom or home, where they could be more basically accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a comparatively cheap way for a complete community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood kids with little treats. A new American custom was born, and it's continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion yearly on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday.

Today's Halloween Traditions
The American Halloween custom of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. In the work of the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food & families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food & wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was known as "going a-souling" was finally taken up by kids who would visit the houses in their neighborhood & be given beer, food, & funds.

The custom of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European & Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain & scary time. Food supplies often ran low &, for the lots of people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were filled with constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts in the event that they left their homes. To keep away from being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts & prevent them from trying to enter.

Halloween Superstitions

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic & superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival in the coursework of which people felt close to deceased relatives & friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps & along the side of the road & lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome & malevolent, & our customs & superstitions are scarier . They avoid crossing paths with black felines, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when lots of people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves in to felines. They try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that jogging under a leaning ladder tends to be dangerous. & around Halloween, , they try to keep away from breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions & beliefs that today's trick-or-theaters have forgotten all about? Lots of of these obsolete rituals focused on the future in lieu of the past & the living in lieu of the dead. In particular, lots of had to do with helping young ladies identify their future husbands & reassuring them that they would someday with luck, by next Halloween be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors & then toss the nuts in to the fire. The nut that burned to ashes than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another story had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts & nutmeg before bed on Halloween night he would dream about her future husband. Young ladies tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; & stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles & looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first visitor to discover a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of coursework, whether we are asking for romantic advice or trying to keep away from seven years of bad luck, each of these Halloween superstitions depends on the nice will of the exact same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.