Photo Credit: lobo235 (Flickr)[/caption]‘Tis the season of falling leaves, cooler weather, pumpkins, and apples, but would the season truly be complete without scary costumes and buckets of Halloween candy? No, of course not. But how exactly did candy and caramel apples and pumpkin carving become tradition on Halloween?
Halloween began in Europe with a group of people known as the Celts. Culturally, this people group believed that the souls of their dead visited Earth on the last day of October and they made the day a holiday known in their culture as Samhain, which translates as “sow” in Irish and now celebrates the end of a harvest season.
When the Romans took over the Celtish people, they altered many of their holidays and traditions, but allowed Samhain to remain. The Romans created a holiday on November 1 called “All Saints Day” and the Catholic Church called the service they held to celebrate All Saints Day “Allhallowmas,” which meant “Mass of all the hallowed” and was commonly referred to as “All Hallows’ Saints Day.” Not much later, the night before Allhallowmas became known as Allhallowe’en and then became known as it is today as Halloween.
The tradition of dressing up in scary costumes such as ghosts or vampires came from the Roman idea that the souls of the dead would be frightened and scared away by the costumes. People also used to leave food and baked goods on the outskirts of town hoping it would distract the souls and keep them from raiding the village. Perhaps this is where the tradition of handing out sweets on Halloween night originated.
Wandering from house to house in search of food is not a recent development. Children would travel from doorstep to doorstep in hopes of getting soul cakes to celebrate the morbid holiday. This is also where Jack-O-Lanterns and pumpkin carving originated, though the children didn’t carve pumpkins, they carved turnips. They would carve turnips with menacing faces, light a candle inside, and carry them around as they asked for soul cakes to ward off souls and ghosts as they traveled around their communities at night.
The majority of other things associated with Halloween--candied apples, parties and candy corn--are just a product of marketing, though they stem from the old traditions. So whether you’re warding off ghosts with Jack-O-Lanterns or eating candy in the comfort of your own home, maybe you’ll take the time to think about why you’re celebrating dead people.
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