Halloween, celebrated each year on October 31, is a mix of ancient Celtic practices, Catholic and Roman religious rituals and European folk traditions that blended together over time to create the holiday we know today. Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and lack and life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. Halloween has long been regarded as the day when the dead can return to earth, and ancient Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off these roaming ghosts. Celtic holiday of Samhain, the Catholic Hallowmas period of All Saints 'Day and All Souls' Day and the Roman festival Feralia all affect the modern holiday of Halloween. In the 19th century, Halloween began to lose the religious connotation, becoming a children's holiday more secular community-based. Although the superstitions and beliefs surrounding Halloween may have evolved over the years, as the days grow shorter and the nights colder, people can still look forward to parades, costumes and sweet treats to usher in the winter.
Ancient Origins of Halloween
the origin of Halloween dates back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain
The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in what is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. Today marks the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of winter, dark and cold, the time of year that is often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing disruption and damage to crops, Celts thought that the presence of other-worldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For people who are entirely dependent on the volatile natural, this prophecy is an important source of comfort and direction during the winter, long and dark.
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 try to tell the fortune of each. 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 AD 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals Roman origin combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The first is Feralia, one day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the dead past. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. 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.
With 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints 'Day', a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope sought to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with special, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in AD 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls Day ", a day to honor the dead. It is celebrated with Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, ahead of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.
Halloween Comes to America
As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween customs with them. Since the rigid Protestant belief systems that characterized early New England, celebration of Halloween in colonial times was very limited there.
This is much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as American Indians, together, obviously the American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebration was "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, each one predicting, dancing, and singing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured telling ghost stories and making all kinds of crimes. In the mid-nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities ever, but Halloween not celebrated everywhere in the country.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. The new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the potato famine in Ireland in 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. 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 tradition of "trick-or-treat". 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 movement 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 children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of this season, and festive costumes. Parents are encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "weird" from the Halloween celebration. Because of their efforts, Halloween lost most of superstition and religious tone at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular holiday, but people-centered, with parades and town-wide parties as entertainment features. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. In the 1950s, city leaders that successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high number of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from urban centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950 the practice of centuries 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. A new American tradition was born, and continues to grow. Currently, Americans spend about $ 6.9 billion per year for Halloween, so the second largest commercial holiday in the country.
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