by Jamie Noel Koslarevic
Sweets or Candy!
That is one of the first things that comes to mind when thinking about Halloween. Another is costumes, pumpkins, spooky stuff! But Halloween, or rather its origins, wasn’t always like this. So where does it all come from?
Picture it: Ireland, Scotland and other regions inhabiting Celts, 2000 years ago.
Anyone surprised that another festival seems to have originated from the Celts?
Anyway, Picture it. The time of harvest was just over, the fields now empty from their fruits of growth and the leaves left the trees barren. All that lovely autumn stuff going on. And in that time the Celts celebrated that end of the harvest months with the now coming colder months marking the new year. Now guess when that new year started? If you guessed November 1st you would be right! And that would make October 31st New Year’s Eve. Kind of.
So the celebration of the end of the harvest months was called Samhain. Lots of feasts would be held, bonfires lit and there were sacrifices and stuff. Different times, different rituals. It was believed that during that night not only would the cold time begin, but the veil between worlds would thin and open, allowing the spirits of the dead to visit for just one night. Guess that is where the spooky stuff came in.
This is that not only friendly family members came to say hi, but also bad spirits, because the veil did not have a filter or something. It’s believed that Celts used masks to ward off these bad spirits. Some say that being loud and costumed with scary grimaces would be used to scare the bad spirits back into the other realm. I have not found a 2000 year old celt to ask them personally but both make sense. So that would be where the spooky costumes come from.
So why pumpkins you may ask! Good questions. Honestly it was a harvest festival so why not. But did you know that in the olden days the faces carved into vegetables were not into pumpkins but turnips? YES Just like we have them all around the castle outside right now. Proper Halloween Jack-o-lantern turnips. Wicked innit? Anyway the whole carving of faces into them I heard comes from a story about some guy named Jack who trapped the devil and then when he died was forced to stay a ghost forever and the devil gave him a light which as in a carved out turnip. Now if you believe it or not is your decision. But soon enough locals started to carve turnips and lit them up to scare off evil spirits. I have no idea why they changed it to pumpkins later, though. Both look pretty scary to me.
I’ve read that around the 9th century the festival became assimilated into the Christian holiday of All Saints’ Day, most likely to make it easier for the Celts to convert, or maybe just to live together more easily by being able to celebrate on the same day because the communities began to merge.
‘Trick or treat’-ing started a lot later in the early 1900s in America and half a century later those treats turned into mostly sweets. But I have found a reference that it may have come from a Scottish Tradition called guising, which as mentioned earlier was a tradition where people disguise themselves in costumes to ward off bad spirits. Sounds just in line with the rest of the Samhain traditions, honestly. Though I have not found anything about why they do the trick or treating. Maybe candy makers just wanted to sell more stuff, or it’s another tradition from somewhere else to combine the holidays.
Since then Halloween has been spreading around the world more and more and while most people do not do this whole thing about spirits visiting or scaring off the bad ones any more, it still is a lot of fun to run around in costume, be spooky and get a lot of candy.
And with that I’ll do exactly that! Have a great spooky season, and thank some turnips and pumpkins for warding off evil spirits!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
