This is Halloween – Then and Now

By Jolene Perron

Ghosts, goblins and witches, oh my!

Halloween is nearly upon us. The festive children’s holiday filled with costumes, candies and junk food. Take away all of those things and what is left? This tradition we have been celebrating for years, where did it come from?

Allow me to take you back 2,000 years ago to the Celtic times in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Northern France. Halloween began as a festival of Samhain which was celebrated on Oct. 31. This marked the end of summer, beginning of the harvest and the dark times of cold winters. On the night of Samhain, the boundary between the living and dead worlds was believed to be blurred and the dead were able to return to earth.

The evening was a celebration with bonfires and animal sacrifices to Celtic dieties. Everyone wore costumes of animal heads and skins and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes with assistance from the dead souls who could return to earth. At the night’s end, everyone would take fire from the bonfire where sacrifces were made to re-light the hearths in their homes.

This was believed to protect them during the winter.

When the Roman Empire conquered the Celtic territories, the Roman brought their traditions known as Feralia and Pomona which merged with Samhain. Feralia commemorated the dead while Pomona honoured the Roman goddess of fruits and trees. Pomona is believed to be the reason people still bob for apples today.

By 609 A.D. Pope Beniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to honor Christian martyrs. This became All Martyrs Day. When it expanded, by 1000 A.D. the church made Nov. 2 All Souls Day to honor the dead. It was also called All-Hallows. On this night, the Christians celebrated similar to Samhain by lighting bonfires, having parades and dressing up in costumes of saints, angels and devils. The night before the night of Samhain eventually came to be called All-Hallows Eve and then Halloween.

Halloween was limited to New England for a long time because of Protestant beliefs in America. When European groups meshed with American traditions, Halloween was celebrated through parties and public events where neighbors would get together to tell fortunes and stories of the dead. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the annual autumn festivals became common but Halloween was not yet celebrated over the entirety of the country. This is changed with the influx of immigrants to America. These new immigrants were mainly Irish fleeing the potato famine in 1846. At this time, Americans began to dress in costume and go door-to-door asking for food or money, which is where “trick-or-treating” originated.

Halloween evolved from a community-based holiday to a vandalism-based holiday with frightening and grotesque costumes and images. Between the late 1800s to 1950, Halloween was given a new face while it moved in to classrooms and personal homes. Trick-or-treating became the way to participate in the event and today Americans spend an average of $6 million every year just on treats.

Ashley Montague, a mother in Amherstburg, has been taking her three-year-old daughter out for Halloween since she was a baby. She herself went trick-or-treating until she was 18-years-old.

“I decorate the house both cute and scary. We do crafts like hang paper spiders and paper ghosts and color pumpkins,” said Montague. “This year I got baby ones and we painted them and added sparkles and a foam name letter for each of us. I even dress my cats in Halloween sweaters, they hate it.”

Montague is very careful when bringing her daughter out to get candy, as most parents are.

However, according to most recent studies, tampered Halloween candy is a myth. On a website called urbanledgends.about.com, David Emery wrote a freelance article explaining “no child has ever been seriously injured or killed as a result of ingesting adulterated candy, apples, or other treats collected door-to-door on Halloween.”

Although parents such as Montague still bring their children’s candy home to further examine it. Montague dumps their candy out on the kitchen table and makes sure no packages are broken, nothing is homemade and so on.

Many neighborhoods also live by a sort of “code.” If the lights are off, the people inside are not participating in the festivities.

As a whole, Halloween is widely celebrated throughout North America and can be either a fun or scary tradition with a lot of history.