• What has a history with a mixture of rituals that include matchmaking, food sharing, big business, pagan traditions, and lots of dressing up as what you are not? If you guessed Halloween, you're eerily correct. And, although historically we get very few if any trick-or-treaters here on the Terrace, you may enjoy the following history of Halloween from, where else?, History.com., with images curated and added by The Terrace Times.
Ancient Origins of Halloween
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in what now is Ireland, the United
Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.
That
day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the
dark, cold winter, a time of year often associated with human
death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the
boundary between the worlds of the living and of the dead became blurred.
On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain (pronounced sow-in), when it was believed
that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth.
In
addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the
presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier 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 and direction during the long, dark
winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred
bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as
sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore
costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted
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 during the coming
winter.
By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire
had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years the Romans ruled the Celtic lands, two 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 traditionally 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
into Samhain probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples
that is practiced today on Halloween.
All Saints Day
On May 13 in A.D. 609, Pope 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. Pope Gregory III
later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all
martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
By the 9th Century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and
supplanted the older Celtic rites. In A.D. 1000, the church would make
November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed
today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of
the dead with a related church-sanctioned holiday.
All Souls Day
was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big 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 word
Alholowmesse 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, eventually, Halloween.
Halloween Comes to America
Celebration
of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of
the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more
common in Maryland and the more 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 -- at which neighbors would share
stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing.
Colonial
Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and
mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th Century,
annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet
celebrated everywhere in the country.
In the second half of that century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new
immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish potato famine, helped popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.
Trick-or-Treat
Borrowing
from Irish and English 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. Young women
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 into 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 children 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 20th Century.
Halloween Parties
By
the 1920s and '30s, Halloween had become a secular,
community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties
as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools
and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many
communities during this time.
By the 1950s, town leaders had
successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday
directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children
born during the 1950s baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into
the classroom or home, where they could more easily be accommodated.
Between
1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating also
was 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.
Thus, a new American
tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend
an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s
second largest commercial holiday, after Christmas.
Soul Cakes & Costumes
The
American Halloween tradition of “trick-or-treating” probably dates back
to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During those festivities,
poor citizens would beg for food and 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 and
wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going
a-souling” eventually was taken up by children who would visit the
houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.
The
tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and
Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and
frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people
afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant
worry.
On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back
to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if
they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts,
people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. To keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food
outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from
attempting to enter.
Black Cats & Witches
Halloween
has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition.
It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt
especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly
spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps
and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find
their way back to the spirit world.
Today’s Halloween ghosts are
often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and
superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats,
afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into black cats.
We
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 walking
under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around
Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on
cracks in the road, or spilling salt.
Halloween Matchmaking
But,
what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s
trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete
rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead
of the dead.
In particular, many had to do with helping young
women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that someday -- with luck, by next Halloween -- they would 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 and then toss the nuts into the
fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or
exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In
some versions of this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that burned
away symbolized a love that would not last.)
Another tale had it
that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts,
hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about
her future husband.
Young women tossed apple peels over their
shoulders, hoping 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; and stood in front of
mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their
shoulders for their husbands’ faces.
Other rituals were more
competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find 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
course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid
seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions
relies on the goodwill of the very same “spirits” whose presence the
early Celts felt so keenly.
