Gabriele Jackson
Halloween is perhaps the only holiday that can compete with Christmas for everyone’s favorite day. There are so many traditions and activities to take part in. These traditions are not from one source—rather, they are from three.
The beloved tradition of dressing up in costumes has origins in the celtic festival of Samhain. During Samhain, people would dress in monster costumes to protect themselves from being mistaken for their ancestors and kidnapped by fairies, who were believed to come out during this time, as the barrier between the human world and the spirit world was temporarily open.
Trick-or-Treating, known as “souling” through the Christian holiday, All Saints’ Day, culminated in poor people visiting the wealthy and exchanging strong prayers and songs for soul cakes.
Bobbing for apples started out as a British courting ritual, where young women would assign each apple to a man and try for the apple they desired. If she got it first try their love was destiny, but if it took three or more tries, their love was doomed.
Haunted houses came about more recently—if the Renaissance can be considered “recent.” Though not true haunted houses, the theater used many creative devices, such as a pig’s bladder strapped to the actor’s midsection, to give death scenes more gore. A rising fascination with the spiritual world allowed seances and fortune telling to become common forms of entertainment for the wealthy.
Jack-O-Lanterns originated in ireland—or it would have, had pumpkins been anywhere to be found in Ireland. Instead, the Irish carved turnips, along with rutabagas, gourds, potatoes, and beets. They placed embers in them to ward off evil spirits.
Halloween colors—black and orange—are yet another contribution from Samhain. To welcome evil spirits and their ancestors, people would wear the color of evil and mourning—black. Orange represents the harvest season, with colors changing to beautiful yellows, reds, and oranges before falling down to blanket the ground.
The tradition of making candy apples originated from the Roman festival Lemuria, a harvest festival associated with the goddess Pomona. During this holiday, Romans would offer fruits to her, including apples, a symbol of fertility and love. The Festival of Pomona is also credited with the prevalence of apple cider.
All these traditions are from different sources, so it’s only right to wonder how they merged into the melting pot of activities that is Halloween. They all developed separately around the same time of the year—during October and November. The primary reason for the close timing is that they are all harvest festivals of some form. Samhain happened to occur at the time of harvest, Lemuria was purely a harvest festival, and on All Saints’ Day there were feasts thrown for the saints that had no day assigned to them,which could only happen if there was a large influx of food. Thanks to this convenient timing, the Roman invasion of Britain merged All Saints’ Day and Lemuria. The later exploration of the New World brought immigrants from all walks of life to America, where the closeness of the British holiday and Samhain allowed them to once again merge. All Saints’ Day’s celebrations ended up being celebrated before the day itself—on All Saints’ Eve, later changed to All Hallow’s Eve, and finally shortened to Halloween.
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