Confession time... I'm a total Halloween enthusiast!
The candy, the excuse to wear black lipstick and watch creepy movies (not that you really need an excuse to do those things in my opinion, but whatever) -- Halloween is my favorite holiday, second maybe to Christmas. Maybe. So now that it's here, I'm planning on sitting in my living room, eating chocolate and watching scary movies.
But Halloween wasn't always about begging for sweets and dressing up. There's a lot more history to America's spookiest holiday than most of us think.
Halloween's origins date back to the Celts, who celebrated a holiday called Samhain on October 31st. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of the darker, colder part of the year when the plants would die. Bonfires were lit and used in divination rituals, of which attempted to seek knowledge through the occult or higher power.
It was believed that during Samhain, the boundary between our life and the next became blurred, and that made it easier for spirits to come into the world of the living— and for the living to fall into the world of the dead.
A similar Roman holiday was Lemuria, which was held in May, and included rituals like pouring milk on the graves of the dead in order to keep them dead.
Once Christianity became the dominant religion, Church officials needed to come up with creative ways to assimilate the pagans into their new religion. So, Lemuria became All Saints' Day, a day to celebrate the holiest of Christian dead. In order to stamp out the Celtic Samhain, All Saints'-- or, All Hallows Day was moved from May 13th to November 1st, making October 31st All Hallows Evening. This was later shortened to All Hallows Eve, and finally, Halloween.
To put the proverbial nail in the coffin on paganism, the Church added a third holiday, celebrating the dead in general, All Souls Day, on November 2nd. Back in the old days, the Church stated that souls in purgatory could be freed through prayer. So, medieval young people used to go begging for "soul cakes," in an early precursor to trick or treating. Proving that even before going to college was a common thing, teenagers would do anything for free food.
Halloween celebrations continued into the 16th and 17th centuries, and despite the efforts of the notoriously prudish Puritans, the holiday was able to make its way across the Atlantic and to American shores. However, Halloween did not gain much popularity until after, oddly enough, the Civil War.
Post-Civil War America saw a huge increase in gothic inspired ghost stories, most likely due to the large number of unclaimed corpses from the war. This also resulted in a rise in Halloween's popularity, and into the 20th century, Halloween celebrations continued.
However, in the desperate times of the Depression, Halloween was a destructive holiday, riddled with pranks and arson. So, schools and churches began organizing Halloween parties for local kids.
Soon, paper costumes were being sold in stores, modeled after film and radio characters. And, come the sixties, as Halloween had become a holiday in its own right, more durable costumes were being produced and soon Halloween became a corporate opportunity, particularly after the release of John Carpenter's classic "Halloween" in the 1970s.
The spookiest night of the year has worn many masks, but all of them are equally creepy.
