History of Halloween

Jessica Mazzone
     Halloween is one of the most celebrated holidays throughout America. We get to dress up, decorate our houses, and carve pumpkins; little kids go trick-or-treating while the older kids go to parties and we get to eat all the candy we want. What’s not to like about this holiday?

Behind all the costumes, candy and decorations lay many traditions that our ancestors have given us to carry on. In the 19th century, Halloween lost its religious connotation and became more of a community-based children’s holiday. Even though we have lost sight of what our ancestors thought Halloween was, we still carry on some of their traditions without knowing it.
    The Celts and the Romans held festival’s representing the end of the “lighter half” of the year and the beginning of the “darker half”. The Celts labeled their festival Samhain, which is derived from Old Irish and means “summers end”. There are many movies that depict that Halloween is the one day out of the year that sprits from the other side can cross over. This was because the ancient Celts believed that the frame between our world and the “Otherworld” became thin allowing these “ghosts” to pass through, the spirits being both good and evil.
   Where do we get the idea that we need to dress up on Halloween? Well the ancient Celts believed that wearing costumes or masks would ward off the harmful spirits. Thus by dressing like one of the harmful spirits they would be left alone. Not only did they use costumes to ward of the evil spirits, they would also hold large bon fires to help protect them from the coming winter. They thought the fires would keep the evil spirits away and they could burn the bad crops and bones from the slaughtered livestock.
        When Halloween moved to America many different cultures meshed their traditions together to give us the holiday that we celebrate today. The celebrations were much more common in the southern colonies. Some of the first celebrations included “play parties,” where families would sit around telling ghost stories, telling each other’s fortunes, dancing, singing, eating and mischief-making. America was hit with thousands of new immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, which only helped popularize the celebration of All Hallows Eve.
        Americans used to dress up and go from house to house asking for food or money, which eventually became our version of trick-or-treating, only we ask for candy instead of money. For quite some time, trick-or-treating went out of style until approximately between 1920 and 1950 when the town leaders had had enough with vandalism. They used trick-or treating as an inexpensive way to bring the community together for the holiday, therefore the families could prevent the tricks being played on them by giving the small children treats; thus giving the Americans a new version of an old tradition to carry on through our generations.
     Not only do we have traditions passed down to us through the ancient Celts and Romans, we also have the “spooky” superstitions. Have you ever wondered why people believe it is bad luck to cross paths with a black cat or walk under ladders, especially on Halloween? Many people in the middle ages believed that witches disguised themselves as black cats to avoid detection. If you were to cross the path of a black cat, the witch would put a “curse” on you. Many of our other superstitions are from beliefs like that one, such as: breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks or even spilling salt.
  We may still carry on some of the old Halloween traditions and beliefs, but we may have forgotten where we get them or why we believe them.