Halloween—History and Tradition
We’ve been weaving discussions of culture and tradition throughout our posts recently, so it’s fitting to talk about Halloween on October 31.
The ancient world. It started with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain with bonfires and costumes to ward off ghosts. It marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter associated with human death. The Celts believed that on the night before the new year – November 1 – the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. They celebrated on the night before – October 31 – the return to earth of the ghosts of the dead.
By 43 A.D. the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory, and in the course of the time that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The first was Feralia in late October that commemorated the passing of the dead. The second, Pomona, with its symbol of the apple, honored the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Anyone ready to bob for apples?
By the 9th century, Christianity had spread into Celtic lands gradually blending with and supplanting older Celtic rites. The Catholic Church honored all saints and martyrs on November 1, and made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead replacing the Celtic festival with a related, church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls’ Day was celebrated with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils.
Coming to America. In colonial America, Halloween was more popular in the Southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the Native Americans meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead and ghost stories, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing and engage in mischief-making. Annual autumn festivals were common by the mid-19th century, but celebrating Halloween everywhere emerged over time.
In the second half of the 19th century, new immigrants helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Halloween parties and community-focused celebrations were common.
By the early 20th Century, Halloween became a community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Due to the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated and the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats solving the problem of vandalism that plagued celebrations earlier in the century.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween#ancient-origins-of-halloween