Candy, costumes, haunted houses, haunted hayrides, and parties….there’s only one thing that can relate to all of these, and it’s a holiday all kids get excited for – you guessed it, it’s Halloween! Halloween is finally approaching us again, and it’s sure to be a good one, now that there won’t be a blizzard to cancel it, unlike last year. I love Halloween because I always look forward to going to the Haunted Graveyard at Lake Compounce, and it’s a frightening but also fun way to get excited for Halloween. I also love it because it’s fun filling up on candy and hanging out with friends. Everybody thinks of dressing up and getting candy when they hear the word “Halloween”, but this fun holiday also has a rather extended history most people have never heard of.
Halloween dates back nearly 2,000 years ago to the ancient Celtic Festivals of Samhain in Ireland. Annually on October 31st, the Celtic people would celebrate Samhain. It was believed that on this day, ghosts of the dead would return to the Earth, hence ghosts playing a large role in today’s Halloween festivites. To celebrate the event, huge sacred bonfires were built to burn crops and sacrifice animals to the Celtic deities, and the Celts wore costumes, which started the custom of dressing into costumes every Halloween. Halloween did not arrive in America until colonial times, which was many centuries later, when customs and beliefs of European ethnic groups and American indians came together. During this age, Halloween celebrations consisted of story telling of the dead, ghost stories, fortune telling, mischief-making, dancing, and singing. Immigrants fleeing from Ireland because of the potato famine in 1846 helped to increase the popularity of Halloween celebrations. Thanks to Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and beg for food and money, going from house to house, eventually evolving into what we now know as “trick-or-treating”. If it weren’t for the Celtics 2,000 years ago, October 31st would just be a typical day!
~Julia Marcouiller