The history of Halloween

Few days of the year offer children the fun of Halloween Fancy dress

, trick or treat, carving pumpkins, bonfires and ghost stories - all around the world, children (and a few adults) celebrate the scary, the silly and the superstitious on the 31st of October.

Halloween has its roots in Ireland and Scotland's ancient Celtic traditions, in the festival of Samhain - "Summer's End". The ancient Celts would celebrate the divide between the "light" half of Summer and the beginning of the "dark" half of Winter, and believed that on this day the barriers separating this world from the afterlife became thin enough for spirits to pass through.

Many of the traditions of Halloween - fancy dress, bonfires, feasting and divination games - have their origins in Samhain. The wearing of costumes and masks is believed to have been a method of warning off harmful spirits by pretending to be one of their number, a practice known as "guising." As the end of summer, Samhain was also the time when the Celts would take stock of their food supplies and prepare for the coming winter; the community would feast in preparation for the coming hardships.

Over time, the beliefs behind Samhain were displaced by Christianity but the celebration lived on. By the 16th century it had more commonly become known as "All Hallows Even", with the name "Halloween" deriving from a Scottish variant of the term. This period also saw the rise of trick-or-treating; incorporating the medieval Christian practice of "souling" - collecting food in return for prayers for the dead - with the Celtic tradition of guising, trick-or-treating has been common since at least the 15th century.

By the 19th century, Halloween had largely become a ritual without any real superstition or belief behind it. The 'spirits' of the afterlife had become a tale to scare and entertain children and the rituals of divination had become little more than games, whilst guising and trick or treating were just a form of communal fun.

However for some time, Halloween became mostly a localised celebration, largely restricted to Irish and Scottish communities in America and Canada. It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that it became a truly widespread practice and it was only in the 1930's that costumes began to appear in stores and Halloween became the secular celebration enjoyed today by both adults and children around the world.

The history of Halloween

By: Cynthia Harrison

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