Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead were thinned. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
When the Roman Empire conquered the Celtic territory by AD 43, they combined two of their traditions – Feralia, a day when the dead were remembered. and a day that honored the goddess of fruit and trees, Pomona, symbolized by the apple.
By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In the year 1000, the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and the opening up of North America to Europeans, and Halloween festivities were few and far between in the strict Protestant northeast. In the southern colonies, Halloween featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities became common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere. In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition.
In Ireland in particular, Halloween was widely celebrated, and they left offerings of food and drink on that day to keep the spirits at bay. The Irish also carved turnips with faces to ward off the evil spirits. Pumpkins are native to North America, so the carving of pumpkins became a tradition. It’s one of the many traditions immigrants from Ireland brought to the United States (including St. Patrick’s Day).
Parents were encouraged to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the 20th century.
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.
The Irvington Halloween Festival tradition of window painting was started to provide young people a chance to “vandalize” local business windows by painting Halloween themed pictures so they would leave the buildings alone. This cherished activity is one of the cornerstones of the festival, and there is a lot of competition to get on the list for painting a window!
In the 1950s, Halloween celebrations moved indoors, with adults holding home parties and taking children trick-or-treating in the new subdivisions built after World War II. Parties included homemade decorations, bobbing for apples and scavenger hunts. Costumes also began to change from hand-made to manufactured, featuring popular culture figures and superheroes from television and movies. Popular costumes of the era included cowboys, ghosts, clowns, witches, and vampires.
Over the last 70 years, Halloween participation has grown over the decades from child-centered to family-centric, with much of the Celtic and spiritual aspects of the holiday left behind. Halloween neighborhood parties, trunk-or-treat events, treat trails, and more are ways to bring a sense of community back to the holiday. During the pandemic of 2020, many people became isolated socially, feeling out of touch with their fellow humans. Since the lifting of restrictions, some people still feel alone and afraid. Perhaps it’s why gathering together to wear silly costumes and sharing candy with strangers seems like a really good idea.
