A (Very Short) History of Halloween

Halloween; the one night a year where its socially acceptable to dress up in costumes, roam the streets after-dark and knock on strangers’ doors demanding candy.

And yet, this celebration is not a completely modern phenomenon, it actually dates back thousands of years. Originally it came from a Celtic festival called Samhain. Samhain marked the end of the summer and the harvest and the beginning of the coming winter. They would light bonfires, wear costumes and hold great gatherings in which they would attempt to ward off evil spirits.

With the spread of Christianity in the early medieval years, many pagans were converted, and, as a common evangelism tactic, the Church would often create a festival that was a more ‘orthodox’ alternative to the pre-existing tradition. This led to the institution of ‘All-Saints’ Day’, or ‘All Hallow’s Day’ celebrated on November 1st.  This meant that the traditional date of Samhain, October 31st, was now All Hallow’s Eve, or,  as it would later become known, Halloween.

Many of the customs of Samhain, like the costume-wearing, the bonfires and parades were carried over into the new, Christian celebration. And, as time went on, customs from other, similar celebrations were assimilated in; like the Scottish tradition of ‘guising’, where children, dressed up as ghosts to successfully hide from the sprits roaming the land, would perform an act, like a song or poem, that would get them rewarded with a ‘treat’. This was an early form of the modern, ‘Trick or Treat’ing.

Pumpkin-carving is a rather more modern custom, with pumpkins actually being native to America. However, over here, Britons would carve faces into swedes or turnips, lighting them from within with a candle and placing them on their windowsills to ward off any ill-meaning spiritual intruders.

Nowadays Halloween is a wildly commercial endeavour, with spending for this one-night celebration reaching as high as £474 million in the UK alone, in 2019. The true origins of this tradition have been somewhat lost, hidden under layers of face-paint and mountains of chocolate wrappers. And yet, there is a still a part that persists, this fascination with ghosts and spirits, and for some, the idea that this is the night where the boundaries between the living and the dead are increasingly thin.