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ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween's roots date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2000 decades ago in the region which is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.
This day at the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dim, cold winter, a time of year which was often related to human death. Celts believed that on the night before the year, the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead became fuzzy. On the nights October 3-1 they celebrated Samhain, as it was believed that the ghosts of the dead came back to ground.
In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it a lot easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions in the foreseeable long term. For many people entirely related to the volatile natural world, these prophecies have been an essential source of comfort and direction during the lengthy, winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell one another's fortunes.
After the party was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
Did You Know?
1 quarter of the candies sold annually from the U.S. is acquired for Halloween.
By forty three A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. At the class of the four hundred years they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The very first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of this dead person. The 2nd was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and also the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of"bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.
ALL SAINTS DAY
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honour of Most Christian martyrsas well as also the Catholic feast of Martyrs Day was set from the Western church. Pope Gregory III afterwards expanded the festival to include most of saints as well as all martyrs, and transferred the observance from May 13 to November 1 ).
From the 9th century that the sway of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, by which it steadily combined with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the deadperson. It is widely believed now the church has been attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related church-sanctioned getaway .
All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The Saints Day celebration was also known as All-hallows or even All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the conventional nights Samhain in the Celtic faith, began to be called Allhallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
HALLOWEEN COMES TO AMERICA
Celebration of all Halloween was extremely restricted in colonial New England on account of the rigid Protestant belief strategies there. Halloween was far more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.
As the beliefs and customs of different European cultural groups in addition to the Western Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween started to emerge. The first celebrations included"play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of this deceased, tell one another's fortunes, dance and sing.
Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief making of kinds. By the center of the century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated all around the country.
In the second half the century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, served popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.
Trickortreat
Borrowing from English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and halloween costumes for go house to house asking for money or food, a practice which eventually became today's"trick-or-treat" custom. Women felt that on Halloween they can divine the name or appearance of the future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
At the late 1800sthere has been a movement in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. In the turn of this century, Halloween parties for both kids and adults became the most common way to rejoice daily. Events focused on games, foods of this season and festive costumes.
Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything"frightening" or"grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. As a consequence of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.
HALLOWEEN PARTIES
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, however community-centered festival, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Inspite of the best efforts of several colleges and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities in that time period.
By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. As a result of high quantities of small children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or house, wherever they are easily adapted.
Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old custom of trick-or-treating was revived. Trickortreating has been a comparatively cheap way for an entire community to share the Halloween party. Theoretically, families could also prevent tricks being performed on them by supplying the neighborhood children with small treats.
So a brand new American tradition was born, also it's continued to grow. Today, Americans spend approximately $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday right after Christmas.
SOUL CAKES
The Halloween heritage of"trickortreating" almost certainly dates back into the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called"soul cakes" in return for their promise to plead to the family of dead family members.
The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as ways to restore the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which had been known to as"going a-souling" was finally taken up by children who'd pay a go to to the homes in their area and be given ale, money and food.
The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. More than 100 years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening moment. Food supplies often ran low and, because of the many people afraid of this dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry.
But on Halloween, when it had been believed that ghosts came back into the planet, people assumed that they would encounter ghosts if they left their own homes. In order to avoid being recognized by these ghosts, individuals would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.
On Halloween, to continue to keep ghosts away from their homes, folks would place bowls of food out of their homes to appease the ghosts and keep them from wanting to enter.
Halloween has always been a holiday filled with secret, magic and superstition. It began like a Celtic end-of-summer festival throughout which individuals felt especially close to deceased family members and family members. For these friendly spiritsthey set places at the table, left treats on door-steps and over the face of the trail and lit candles to help family members locate their way back into the spirit environment.
Today's Halloween ghosts tend to be portrayed as far more gruesome and malevolent, and also our customs and superstitions are scarier also. We stay clear of crossing trails using cats that are black, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This notion has its own origins in the Middle Ages, when many individuals thought that dinosaurs prevented detection by turning themselves to black cats.
We make an effort never to walk under ladders for equal motive. This superstition may possibly have come from the early Egyptians, who believed the triangles had been sacred (it may also have something to do with the fact walking beneath a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And approximately Halloween, notably, we try in order to avoid dividing mirrors, stepping on cracks at the trail or spilling salt.
HALLOWEEN Match-making
However, what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs which today's trick or treaters have forgotten all about? A number of the outdated rituals centered around the near future rather than their prior and the living instead of the lifeless person.
Specifically, many experienced to accomplish with aiding women discover their husbands and reassuring them that they would --with luck, by next Halloween--be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring inside her mashed-potatoes on Halloween evening time, hoping to bring real love into the diner who detected it.
In Scotland, fortunetellers recommended an eligible young woman identify a hazelnut for every one of her suitors and then toss the nuts in to the hearth. The nut that burned to ashes instead of exploding or popping, the narrative wentrepresented the lady's husband. (In some versions with this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that burnt away symbolized a romance that would not last.)
The other narrative had it that if your young woman ate a sour concoction crafted from walnuts, hazelnuts and peppermint before bed Halloween evening she would dream about her upcoming husband.
Young girls pitched apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping the lotions could fall over the floor inside the form of the prospective husbands' initials; tried to know about their stocks by peering in egg yolk drifting at a bowl of water; and burst in front of mirrors in darkened chambers, retaining candles and looking above their shoulders for their husbands' faces.
Other rituals were competitive. At certain Halloween parties, even the first visitor to locate a burr onto a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the very first successful apple-bobber are the first down the aisle.
Clearly, no matter if we are asking for romantic information or attempting to avoid seven years of awful fortune, every of the simple Halloween superstitions depends upon the goodwill of the exact same"spirits" whose presence the ancient Celts felt so keenly.
