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Halloween
A jack-o'-lantern
Also called	Hallowe'en, All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Eve, Samhain, Spooky Day, Snap-Apple Night
Observed by	Many Western nations, including the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Canada, sometimes Australia and New Zealand
Type	Pagan, Religious, Cultural
Significance	There are many sources of the significance of Halloween
Celebrations	Trick-or-treating, Bobbing for apples, Costume parties, Carving jack-o'-lanterns
Date	October 31

Halloween is a tradition celebrated on the night of October 31, most notably by children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting sweets, fruit, and other treats. It is celebrated in parts of the Western world, most commonly in the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Puerto Rico, and with increasing popularity in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Philippines. In recent years, Halloween is also celebrated in parts of Western Europe, such as Belgium and France. Halloween originated as a Pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain with Irish, Scots, Welsh and other immigrants transporting versions of the tradition to North America in the 19th century. Most other Western countries have embraced Halloween as a part of American pop culture in the late 20th century.

The term Halloween, and its older spelling Hallowe'en, is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening before "All Hallows' Day" (also known as "All Saints' Day"). The holiday was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the old Christian feast of All Saints Day from May 13 to November 1. In Ireland, the name was All Hallows' Eve (often shortened to Hallow Eve), and though seldom used today, it is still a well-accepted label. The festival is also known as Samhain or Oíche Shamhna to the Irish, Calan Gaeaf to the Welsh, Allantide to the Cornish and Hop-tu-Naa to the Manx. Halloween is also called Pooky Night in some parts of Ireland, presumably named after the púca, a mischievous spirit.

Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when spirits can make contact with the physical world and when magic is most potent (e.g. Catalan mythology about witches, Irish tales of the Sídhe).

Trick-or-treating and guising

The main event of modern US-style Halloween is trick-or-treating, in which children dress up in costume disguises and go door-to-door in their neighborhood, ringing each doorbell and yelling "trick or treat!" Although this resembles the older tradition of guising in Ireland and Scotland, ritual begging on Halloween does not appear in English-speaking America until the 20th century, and may have developed independently. The occupants of the house (who might themselves dress in a scary costume) will then hand out small candies, miniature chocolate bars, and sometimes even soda pop. Some American homes will use sound effects and fog machines to help set a spooky mood. Other house decoration themes (that are less scary) are used to entertain younger visitors. Children can often accumulate many treats on Halloween night, filling up entire pillow cases or shopping bags.

In Ireland, great bonfires were lit throughout the breadth of the land. Young children in their guises were gladly received by the neighbors with some "fruit, apples and nuts and of course sweets" for the "Halloween Party", whilst older male siblings played innocent pranks on bewildered victims.

In Scotland, children or guisers are more likely to recite "The sky is blue, the grass is green, may we have our Halloween" instead of "trick or treat!". They visit neighbours in groups and must impress the members of the houses they visit with a song, poem, trick, joke or dance in order to earn their treats. Traditionally, nuts, oranges, apples and dried fruit were offered, though sometimes children would also earn a small amount of cash, usually a sixpence. Very small children often take part, for whom the experience of performing can be more terrifying than the ghosts outside.

In England, trick or treating does take place, particularly in working class neighbourhoods. On the whole, however, it is frowned upon as at best a nuisance and at worst a menacing form of begging, and as a negative part of American global culture. In some areas households have started to put decorations on the front door to indicate 'trick-or-treaters' are welcome, the idea being that 'trick-or-treaters' don't approach a house that isn't 'participating'. Adapted from Scotland, children often, recite "The sky is blue the grass is green, have you got a penny for halloween. If not a penny, a half penny will do, if not a penny, then God bless you" in an attempt to gain money instead of treats. More common practice with teenagers, but youngsters also follow suit.

Tricks play less of a role in modern Halloween, though Halloween night is often marked by vandalism such as soaping windows, egging houses or stringing toilet paper through trees. Before indoor plumbing was so widespread, tipping over or displacing outhouses was a popular form of intimidation. Casting flour into the faces of feared neighbors was also done once upon a time.

Typical Halloween costumes have traditionally been monsters such as vampires, ghosts, witches, and devils. In recent years, it has become common for costumes to be based on themes other than traditional horror, such as dressing up as a character from a TV show or movie, or choosing a recognizable face from the public sphere, such as a politician (in 2004, for example, George W. Bush and John Kerry were both popular costumes in America). In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, for example, costumes of, firefighters, police officers, and United States military personnel became popular. In 2004, an estimated 2.15 million children in the United States were expected to dress up as Spider-Man, the year's most popular costume.

"'Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" has become a common sight during Halloween in North America. Started as a local event in a Philadelphia suburb in 1950, and expanded nationally in 1952, the program involves the distribution of small boxes by schools to trick-or-treaters, in which they can solicit small change donations from the houses they visit. It is estimated that children have collected more than $119 million (US) for UNICEF since its inception. In 2006 UNICEF discontinued their Halloween collection boxes in parts of the world, citing safety and administrative concerns.

BIGresearch conducted a survey for the National Retail Federation in the USA and found that 53.3% of consumers planned to buy a costume for Halloween 2005, spending $38.11 on average (up 10 dollars from last year). They are also expected to spend $4.96 billion in 2006, up significantly from just $3.29 billion the previous year.

A child usually "grows out of" trick-or-treating by his or her teenage years. Trick-or-treating by teenagers is accepted, but generally discouraged with genial ribbing by those handing out candy. Teenagers and adults instead often celebrate Halloween with costume parties, bonfire parties, staying home to give out candy, listening to Halloween music, watching horror movies or scaring people.

Games and other activities

There are several games traditionally associated with Halloween parties. The most common is dooking or bobbing for apples, in which apples float in a tub or a large basin of water; the participants must use their teeth to remove an apple from the basin. A variant involves kneeling on a chair, holding a fork between the teeth and trying to drop the fork into an apple. Another common game involves hanging up treacle or syrup-coated scones by strings; these must be eaten without using hands while they remain attached to the string, an activity which inevitably leads to a very sticky face.

Some games traditionally played at Halloween are forms of divination. In Puicíní (pronounced "pooch-eeny"), a game played in Ireland, a blindfolded person is seated in front of a table on which several saucers are placed. The saucers are shuffled and the seated person then chooses one by touch. The contents of the saucer determine the person's life for the following year. A saucer containing earth means someone known to the player will die during the next year, a saucer containing water foretells travel, a coin means new wealth, a bean means poverty, etc. In 19th-century Ireland, young women placed slugs in saucers sprinkled with flour. The wriggling of the slugs and the patterns subsequently left behind on the saucers were believed to portray the faces of the women's future spouses.

In North America, unmarried women were frequently told that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror. However, if they were destined to die before they married, a skull would appear. The custom was widespread enough to be commemorated on greeting cards from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The telling of ghost stories and viewing of horror films are common fixtures of Halloween parties. Television specials with a Halloween theme, usually aimed at children, are commonly aired on or before the holiday while new horror films are often released theatrically before the holiday to take advantage of the atmosphere.

Visiting a haunted house or a dark attraction are other Halloween traditions. Notwithstanding the name, such events are not necessarily held in houses, nor are the edifices themselves necessarily regarded to possess actual ghosts. A variant of this is the haunted trail, where the public encounters supernatural-themed characters or presentations of scenes from horror films while following a trail through a heavily wooded area or field. One of the largest Halloween attractions in the U.S.A. is Knott's Scary Farm in California, which features re-themed amusement park rides and a dozen different walkthrough mazes, plus hundreds of costumed roving performers. http://www.flashgamesclub.ru/screen/humor-halloweengame.jpg

Foods

Because the holiday comes in the wake of the annual apple harvest, candy apples (also known as toffee, taffy or caramel apples) are a common treat at Halloween. They are made by rolling whole apples in a sticky sugar syrup, and sometimes then rolling them in nuts. At one time candy apples were a common treat given to children, but this practice rapidly waned after widespread rumors that some individuals were embedding items like pins and razor blades in the apples that they would pass out to children. While there is evidence of such incidents occurring they are very rare and have never resulted in any serious injuries. Nonetheless, many parents were under the assumption that the practice was common. At the peak of this hysteria, some hospitals were offering to x-ray children's Halloween haul at no cost in order to look for such items. Almost all of the very few Halloween candy poisoning incidents on record involved parents who poisoned their own children's candy, while there are occasional reports of children sticking needles in their own candy (and that of other children) more in an effort to get attention than cause any harm.

A Halloween custom which has survived unchanged to this day in Ireland is the baking (or more often nowadays the purchase) of a barmbrack (Irish "báirín breac"). This is a light fruit cake into which a plain ring is placed before baking. It is said that whoever finds this ring will find his or her true love during the following year. See also King cake

Other foods associated with the holiday:

• candy corn
• bonfire toffee (in the UK)
• Toffee Apple (in Australia, England, Wales and Scotland, instead of "Candy Apples")
• hot apple cider
• roasted or popped corn
• roasted pumpkin seeds
• pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread
• "fun-sized" or individually wrapped pieces of small candy, typically in Halloween colors of orange, and brown/black.
• novelty candy shaped like skulls, pumpkins, bats, worms, etc.

Cultural history

Halloween and All Saints' Day

Pope Boniface IV established an anniversary dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the martyrs when he consecrated the Pantheon on May 13, 609 (or 610). This Christian feast day was moved to November 1 from May 13 by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century in order to mark the dedication of the All Saints Chapel in Rome — establishing November 1 as All Saints Day and October 31 as All Hallows' Eve. Initially this change of date only applied to the diocese of Rome, but was extended to the rest of Western Christianity a century later by Pope Gregory IV in an effort to standardize liturgical worship. It was instituted by the Church to honor all the saints, known and unknown, and, according to Urban IV, to supply any deficiencies in the faithful's celebration of saints' feasts during the year. The coincidence of two days, one Christian and one pagan, honoring the dead was fortuitous, as there is no documentation that either Gregory III or IV was aware of or responding to Samhain in the choice of date. The All Saints Day for the Eastern Orthodox Church is still celebrated in the summer period (actually the Sunday 8 weeks after the Easter Day).

The feast day of All Souls Day, celebrated to commemorate those souls condemned temporarily to Purgatory, was inaugurated by Saint Odilo of Cluny, at the time the abbott of the influential monastery at Cluny, on November 2, 998. The observation of the holy day quickly spread to monastaries under his control in France and England, and from there to the Catholic Church in general.

Origin: Celtic observation of Samhain

According to what can be reconstructed of the beliefs of the ancient Celts, the bright half of the year ended around November 1 or on a Moon-phase near that date, a day referred to in modern Gaelic as Samhain ("Sow-in" or alternatively "Sa-ven", meaning: End of the Summer). After the adoption of the Roman calendar with its fixed months, the date began to be celebrated independently of the Moon's phases.

As October 31st is the last day of the bright half of the year, the next day also meant the beginning of Winter, which the Celts often associated with human death, and with the slaughter of livestock to provide meat for the coming Winter. The Celts also believed that on October 31, the boundary separating the dead from the living became blurred. There is a rich and unusual myth system at work here; the spirit world, the residence of the "Sídhe," as well as of the dead, was accessible through burial mounds. These mounds opened at two times during the year, Samhain and Beltane, making the beginning and end of Summer highly spiritually resonant.

The Celts' survival during the cold harsh winters depended on the prophecies of their priests and priestesses (Druids), and the accurate prediction of how much food would be needed to sustain the people before the next harvest. They believed that the presence of spirits would aid in the ability to make predictions about the coming year.

The exact customs observed in each Celtic region differ, but they generally involved the lighting of bonfires and the reinforcement of boundaries, across which malicious spirits might be prevented from crossing and threatening the community.

Like most observances around this season, warmth and comfort were emphasized, indulgence was not. Stores of preserved food were needed to last through the winter, not for parties.

Samhain mistaken as New Year

Popular literature over the last century has given birth to the near universal assumption that Samhain and folkways of Hallowe'en, was the "Celtic New Year". Both the work of scholarly historians and Neopagan writers have begun to scrutinize this assertion. The historian Ronald Hutton, in his study of the folk calendar of the British Isles points out that there are no references which attest to this usage earlier than the 18th century, neither in church nor civic records. Although it may be generally correct to refer to Samhain as "Summer's End", this point of descent into the year's darkness may require better proof for us to cite this "end" as also being a "beginning". On the other hand, there is a huge volume of proof of the western world, including late Celtia, as having begun their calendars either at the end of December or around March 25th at various periods back through and before Medieval times.

Norse Elven Blót

In the old Norse religion an event believed to occur around the same time of the year as Halloween was the álfablót (elven blót), which involved sacrifices to the elves and the blessing of food. The elves were powers connected to the ancestors, and it can be assumed that the blót related to a cult of the ancestors. The álfablót is also celebrated in the modern revival of Norse religion, Ásatrú.

Religious viewpoints

The fact that Halloween and the old Christian feast of All Saints Day are on two consecutive days have left many modern Christians uncertain of how they should react towards this tradition.

Most Christians ascribe no doctrinal significance to Halloween, treating it as a purely secular entity devoted to celebrating imaginary spooks and handing out candy. Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the senior exorcist of Vatican City, said in an interview with London's The Sunday Telegraph, "f … children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that." The secular celebration of Halloween may loom larger in contemporary imagination than does All Saints Day. Some Christian churches commonly offer a fall festival or harvest-themed alternative to Halloween. Others focus on the Christian aspect of the following All Saints Day. Still other Christians hold the view that the holiday is not satanic in origin or practice and that it holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children: being taught about death and mortality actually being a valuable life lesson. To many Protestant churches, October 31 is also the date of Reformation Day, a minor religious festival and it is often used to reclaim the Christian aspects of the tradition, the All Saints Day, as a day of prayer.

Many other Christians, including those in Church leadership positions, consider Halloween as incompatible and conflicting with the Christian faith, due to its preoccupation with the occult in symbols, masks and costumes, its origin as pagan festival of the dead, and the fact that it is considered by satanists and other occult groups as a festival celebrated with certain rituals. They argue that Halloween is also a prime recruiting season for satanists and therefore poses a considerable chance for children to convert. They point out that while even many Christians may participate "all in fun," Halloween is serious business for satanists and witches. Others are concerned about vandalism and destructive behavior after a church had become a victim of destructive "shock rituals" by satanists leading to targeted monitoring of these gatherings by the police. Another argument brought forward is that according adherents of Wicca (witchcraft) practices “Halloween is one of the four major Sabbats celebrated by the modern Witch, and it is by far the most popular and important of the eight that are observed. . . Witches regard Halloween as their New Year’s Eve, celebrating it with ... rituals. . .“ (Dunwich, Gerina. The Pagan Book of Halloween, p. 120). The rationale behind the opposition of many Christians against Halloween can be best summarized by a statement of a former high priest in the Celtic tradition of Wicca (witchcraft): "The modern holiday we call Halloween has its origins in the full moon closest to November 1, the witches’ New Year. It was a time when the "spirits" (demons) were supposed to be at their peak power and revisiting the earth planet. ... Halloween is purely and absolutely evil, and there is nothing we ever have or will do that would make it acceptable to the Lord Jesus." Therefore many Christians across all denominations reject Halloween because it trivializes the occult and what they perceive as evil. Some Evangelical and Protestant Churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church and many Roman Catholics , Jews and Muslims, object to the tradition and refuse to allow their children to participate, pointing out to its pagan origins as well as its occult imagery.

The ways how Christian Churches deal with Halloween are various. Most Churches ignore Halloween and treat it as a merely secular tradition. In the Anglican Church some dioceses, picking up a concern amongst parents and teachers, called to focus more on the positive messages of All Saints Day, the day following Halloween. For many Protestant Churches, October 31 is celebrated as Reformation Day in remembrance of the Reformation. Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God is traditionally sung on this day. Other Christians, particularly Roman Catholics and the Eastern Churches, traditionally focus more on All Saints Day which is celebrated the day after Halloween as a day of prayer. Many Catholic Churches have instituted the days before All Saints Day which is on November 1 as days of special devotion such as the tradition of ‘40 hours of adoration and prayer’. Another response among Christians in recent years has been the use of Hell houses or themed pamphlets (such as those of Jack T. Chick) which attempt to make use of Halloween as an opportunity for evangelism. The tradition, to discourage pagan celebrations and to give it a Christian meaning can be traced back historically to the eighth century when Pope Gregory III designated November 1st as All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. Some believe that All Saints Day was moved to November 1 to counteract the ghouls, demons, and devils that were celebrated on October 31.

Objections to celebrating Halloween are not limited to those of the Abrahamic religions. Some members of the Wiccan practice feel that the tradition is offensive to real witches for promoting a stereotypical caricature of a witch. Additionally, many Wiccans and other neo-Pagan adherents object to Halloween, which they perceive as a vulgarized, commercialized mockery of the original Samhain rituals which are traditionally celebrated at October 31.

See also

• Fakelore
• Halloween traditions

Additional reading

• Diane C. Arkins, Halloween: Romantic Art and Customs of Yesteryear, Pelican Publishing Company (2000). 96 pages. ISBN 1565547128
• Diane C. Arkins, Halloween Merrymaking: An Illustrated Celebration Of Fun, Food, And Frolics From Halloweens Past, Pelican Publishing Company (2004). 112 pages. ISBN 158980113X
• Phyllis Galembo, Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes and Masquerade, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (2002). 128 pages. ISBN 0810932911
• Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford Paperbacks (2001). 560 pages. ISBN 0192854488
• Jean Markale, The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween: Celebrating the Dark Half of the Year (translation of Halloween, histoire et traditions), Inner Traditions (2001). 160 pages. ISBN 0892819006
• Lisa Morton, The Halloween Encyclopedia, McFarland & Company (2003). 240 pages. ISBN 078641524X
• Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Oxford University Press (2002). 198 pages. ISBN 0195146913
• Jack Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, University of Tennessee Press (1994). 280 pages. ISBN 0870498134
• David J. Skal, Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, Bloomsbury USA (2003). 224 pages. ISBN 1582343055
• Ben Truwe, The Halloween Catalog Collection. Portland, Oregon: Talky Tina Press (2003). ISBN 0970344856.
• Dymally, B. 2006. Halloween: Satan's New Year
• Gershom, K. 2005. Halloween: Counterfeit Holy Day
• Hatcher, L. 2006. The Magic Eightball Test: A Christian Defense of Halloween and All Things Spooky
• Russo, R. 1998. Halloween: What's a Christian to Do?

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