The informal history of Halloween

October 28, 2009
By John Tienken
Columnist

Halloween comes and goes. Every year. A sure a thing as the reappearance of uncannily horrid horror movie sequels every October and overzealous Halloween decorations in abundance at the local department store shortly after the Fourth of July.  But so is the case, that Americans spend 6.9 billion dollars for Halloween annually.

It would almost be cliché to ascribe to this holiday the adjective of "over-commercialized" and then go on to write a column on it. I will leave that for someone else in someone else’s newspaper, but what I would like to expound on is the history of Halloween.

Halloween is a certainly hallowed holiday with its origins tracing back to the Celtic peoples of ancient England and France. The Celts celebrated their new year at the end of the harvest on Nov. 1.

They danced, reveled in the plentiful food, in the last vestiges of warm weather celebrating the end of a successful summer before the trials of winter set in. Common in those times during winter was death and disease perhaps the beginning of Halloween’s dependence on skulls and skeletons.

This association with death occurred the night before the Celtic New Year, October 31st was the day when the boundaries between life and death, this world and another became blurred and ghoulish spirits came out to wreak havoc on their crops. Again one can see the beginning of ghosts and goblins becoming an integral part of this holiday, perhaps the first trick-or-treaters.

It came to the Americas in colonial times and while many may associate early Halloween with Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman and colonial New England, Halloween actually began to take root in the Southern states.  As it was celebrated, the English-Irish origins of beet carving merged with Native American horticulture beginning the American obsession with carving pumpkins and creating Jack of the Lanterns.

Costumed children running and screaming in the night is a more recent phenomena dating to the turn of the last century when Halloween became a more community centered and neighborly holiday. Before Halloween often was a frightening and filled with thoroughly religious overtones where people walked from house to house begging for food or money.

But as time went one Halloween parties were less about pranks and begging and more about getting people together to bob apples and converse about things other than witchcraft and spirits. That was left to the kids.

And so we have modern Halloween, where hooligans and pranksters of the Celtic era have been replaced by a thousand Harry Potters and princesses zigzagging across the block with only twilight and the temptations of sugar to keep them going. They beg for candy now instead of food.

Happy Halloween UIS