Halloween is more than just a holiday where little kids dress up and go trick or treating. It’s a holiday that has a lot of history behind it: a dark past that needs to be told in more ways than one. It all started with an ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the state between the worlds of the living and the dead would be opened. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes and attempted to read each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearths fires.
By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of the Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic land, two festivals remained. The first was Feralia, a day where the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second one was a day to honor Pomona, the 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.
By the ninth century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-Hallowmas and the night before it, the traditional night before Samhain in the Celtic religion, started to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief system there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the belief and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians mashed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds.
Taking 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. 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. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. 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. Today, Americans spend an estimated six billion dollars annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday.
