As we approach Halloween, it is worth looking at the origins of the celebration and how it became such a popular annual event in the United States. The story is an interesting journey into the mists of time.
Halloween owes its origin to the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhan of over 2000 years ago, intermingled with the Christian feast of All Hallows Eve of October 31st. The Celtric Druids, a pre-Christian pagan group in Ireland of that era, celebrated Samhan as the change of seasons from summer to winter in their calendar. It was a time of bringing in the harvest, of feasts and of celebrating the dead. It was also supposed to blur the divisions between the living and the dead and of life and death, as if the two were both part of one indivisible journey.
In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the Christian Church established two holy days, All Saints Day and All Souls Day which also happened to fall around the time of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhan. Taking a poor view of pagan celebrations and wishing to assert the primacy of Christian thought and practice, the Church sought to combine the original folk traditions with Christian feasts by creating the feast of All Hallows. It was first established in the 7th century AD by Pope Boniface IV to commemorate the hallowed members of the faith (the saints) and to be celebrated in May of each year. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III brought the date forward to November 1st followed by a celebration on November 3rd, All Souls Day, to commemorate the dead. These dates were in close proximity to those of the ancient Samhan which resulted in a meshing of the two traditions in subsequent years. From that time, the two traditions became one part of the broader Western culture.
In modern times, the celebration of Halloween has become a major annual event throughout the world. It has become deeply rooted in US culture and tradition and become a major commercial event. How did that happen?
In the colonial period, Halloween was celebrated in communities mainly in Maryland and the South, regions notable for their strong Roman Catholic communities. Halloween, owing to its associations with witches, goblins, the dead and religious saints, was not popular in the colonies of New England and the mid-Atlantic where the Puritan and non-conformist faiths were strong.
It was only from the middle of the 19th century with the arrival of Irish immigrants bringing their old Celtic traditions that the celebration really took hold in the United States. Settling in the large conurbations of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, these Celtic Irish traditions were seen as harmless jollity and then spread nationally. By the end of the 19th century, Halloween had become a national celebration.
The tradition of ‘trick or treating’ was also brought over from Irish/British culture to America, a tradition that the US has now made its own, with more emphasis on the ‘treat’ than the ‘trick’ element, as a gesture of respect to wary householders!
Other traditions are also home grown. The tradition of bobbing for apples is one that owes its origins to the abundance of America’s favorite fruit and perhaps too to the great American tradition of expecting people to work for their prizes. The practice of displaying pumpkins marked with frightening features and their use as lanterns is also a long-standing American tradition in keeping with the dark and scary traditions of Halloween. The shelling out of candies, nuts and apples hark back too to earlier times.
Today, you could say that Halloween has become almost as ‘American as apple pie’ – with the tradition of bobbing for apples as an apt symbol each October 31st. With the inevitable turn of the commercial wheel, Halloween now flows into the next feast of Thanksgiving, and then of Christmas, Hannukah and the New Year as symbols of religious, cultural and commercial life.
Although an intensely modern celebration, the history shows that Halloween has deep historical origins which underpin humanity’s continuing fascination with death, the unknown and the links between life and death.
