If you read my blog till now you might already know this, and if not, I will repeat it. I just love this holiday.
Most people are probably looking at me like I just grew a second head. What is so special about Halloween, you might ask.
Well, I'm not exactly talking about only Halloween here. The traditions and history behind these holidays are just too cool for me not to like.
1. Samhain
This is the original holiday Halloween is based on. It's a Gaelic harvest festival, held between October 31 and November 1, and it is also known as the "Celtic New Year", because the harvests marked the end of the lighter year and the beginning of the darker. It has some elements of the festival of the dead too, with bonfires and lights. You might be asking why am I writing about this all in present tense. The truth is, the holiday is still celebrated until today, mostly by wiccans (Wicca is a neopaganist "religion" that mostly draws from the old traditions of witchcraft. Wiccans usually promote oneness with the divine.) 2. All Hallows Eve
Hallows All Hallows is an old therm of All Saints. The word hallow comes from the old English word "halig", which means holy. This was compared to the word Saint, and the Latin word sanctus, which also means holy. All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Eve is celebrated either on the first November (by western Christianity), either on the first Sunday after Pentecost (by eastern Christianity). All Saints Eve is - as the name says - celebrating every single saint. This holiday doesn't end here tho, it is usually followed by:3. All Souls' Day
All Souls' Day commemorates all the people who past away. It is celebrated on the 2nd of November. This holiday can be also known as: 4. Festival of the Dead, or Day of the Dead
This is basically the same thing as All Souls' Day. It usually is about the whole family gathering in a place and praying for the friends and family members who passed away. And now we come to the last one:
5. Halloween
Halloween is probably a combination of all of the celebrations I mentioned before. It's celebrated on the 31st October, and I can probably say it includes almost every single symbol from the other holidays. This is why I will mention these only here. a. Carved pumpkins
The Hallowe’en jack-o’-lantern is both a new and an ancient practice.Originally, it comes from an old Irish legend of a man called Stingy Jack, a farmer who played a trick on the devil and as punishment was cursed to wander the earth, lighting his way with a candle inside a hollowed-out turnip.
When the tradition moved to America pumpkins were used instead of turnips, as they were both more available and easier to carve.
b. Trick-or-treating
This tradition comes from Great Britain, where kids and poor people prayed for the dead in exchange of cakes. c. Masks and costumes
The tradition of dressing up comes from the Celts. They used to dress up in an attempt to copy the evil spirits and appease them. In Scotland for instance kids dressed up in black and white to copy the dead. The reason we can see so many horrific masks and costumes nowadays are also because of the general knowledge of horror stories and movies. Most of the symbols used in movies are picked up on quite fast. (And in my opinion they also have an origin in the Romantic era. As far as I learned in school most of the literature in that era had symbols like these. The reason you might be surprised of this is because people tend to confuse romanticism with sentimentalism. They are two different things, people, you have to learn that!)
