Halloween

Halloween, the costume-crazed holiday is celebrated around the world with great amusement. This spooky tradition is celebrated on the 31^st of October every year. But the Halloween today is not the same it used to be. There is a long interesting evolution of Halloween and history through which we get to the Halloween of today. The holiday known as the Halloween began around 2000 years ago. It was a holiday that was celebrated by the Celts and the people that populated Ireland and Scotland and the isle of man.

Moreover, the holiday that the people celebrated wasn’t called Halloween, it was called Samhain and this festival marked the end of the Celt year. The Celtic calendar was basically divided into two main categories: the dark and the light, meaning winter and the summer, and October 31 marked the transition from summer into winter. This was the night that the Celts saw there being a tenuous hold between our world and the world of the spirits and the fairies. They would put out food and drinks so that the spirits would be happy and they would accept this as a gift and they would be ensured of a prosperous year coming ahead. Some of these Celts would dress up in costumes and this was a means of protecting themselves from any vengeful spirits that might attack them on this night. This was also a time that the departed souls of the people themselves would come back to our world and so one tradition that they had was to leave an empty chair in front of the fire or to leave empty chairs at the feast to welcome their relatives who were back with them on this night.

In the ninth century, the Roman Catholic church tried to change some of the pagan rituals that were going on, and one of their ways of doing this was to supplant holidays of their own on to the pagan holidays. So, Samhain was changed by the Roman Catholics to what is known as “All hallow tide”, which was a three-day festival. It started with All hallows eve on October 31, followed by All Hallows day which was November 1^st, that’s also known as All Saints day and then finally on November 2^nd, all Souls day.

Starting in the fifteenth century, a tradition known as ‘souling’ started, in which people went door to door, singing songs and talking in verses for the purpose of getting the ‘soul cakes’, which was a food that was meant appease the dead. The household that gave them was given good fortune for the coming year.

Furthermore, All hallows eve October 31, which was Samhain for the Celts, this still was a time, where there was this recognition if not celebration of the supernatural and that time when the dead walked the earth. It was thought that people who had died during that year, their spirits were still wandering in this kind of limbo and they were not to ascend to heaven or descend to hell until November 1^st. In the sixteenth century there was a tradition that started in Scotland and was also practiced in parts of Ireland known as ‘guising’ and this was similar to ‘souling’, with the addition that the people would dress up in costumes and go door to door asking for food and money. In other parts of British Isles, it was known as mumming. These traditions held true generation after generation.

It was in the nineteenth century, when there was a big influx of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the united states of America and in Canada, that these traditions of guising and mumming were adopted in North America and slowly, bit by bit, the custom caught on.

the holiday of Halloween was very popular in Victorian times; this was the late 1800s or early 1900s. The Victorians were very much into brining back old traditions. There was very much of an interest in the occult and spiritualism and they would have parties that largely were for young adults and had many games that were part of the celebration that were centered around young people and romance. For instance, bobbing for apples, the person that got an apple and bit into it was going to be the next person married.

Trick-or-treating interestingly was not practiced during the Victorian period. For a long time, adults were kind of staggered about this custom. There weren’t a lot of rules centered around it so people didn’t know when it was happening or why these kids were coming to their doors asking for money and food. What firmed up the custom was a group of kids in Philadelphia in 1950, who donated all the money that they collected on Halloween night to UNICEF, this became an annual tradition with UNICEF. Until 1965, when they had amassed so much money by these efforts of children on Halloween that they won the noble peace prize in 1965. Trick or treating for UNICEF became such a big thing that all of a sudden trick-or-treating didn’t have that mysterious aspect anymore. Everybody was doing it and everybody expected children to be on the streets, in the neighborhoods on Halloween night, going door to door.

Halloween is a combination different traditions and customs, but there are two things that remained consistent since the very beginning and that is that it’s a time where the supernatural and superstitions are recognized and secondly it’s a time to celebrate and to share food.

Halloween has now become a global phenomenon where people wait eagerly for this holiday. They plan intensively what they are going to wear and how much they are going to enjoy. But, sometimes your work comes into the enjoyment of this holiday. If you are a student, your due assignment will be the only thing spooky in this holiday, but worry not, if you are a student and you want to dress up and enjoy Halloween, you can take help from writing services in UK. You can easily find the best essay writing UK service there is.