Believe it or not, Halloween is about more than superhero costumes and abundant candy.
Everyone’s favorite spooky holiday has a long and interesting history
that has its origins in Pagan celebrations and tricksters named Jack. This is the messed-up
history of Halloween.
Once upon a time, Halloween wasn't just an occasion to get dressed up in costumes and
go begging for candy from door to door. If you go back far enough in history,
you'll find that Halloween has its roots in an ancient festival. It was a celebration
that marked the end of a fruitful harvest and the coming of a cold winter...and death.
The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain was something of a new year celebration.
It was held around November 1st on the modern calendar. And it acknowledged that the warm and
lush seasons of spring and summer were coming to a close. In their place, the cold and hard
times of autumn and winter were to take over. Many believed that in this transitional period
between the life-giving part of the year and the frigid winter months, the dead were closest to the
living. Some dead spirits could be communicative or even helpful, while others might prove to be
more troublesome. Deities were also appeased with bonfires and sacrifices. Religious leaders such
as Druids attempted to foretell the future with assistance from the spiritual energy thought to
be at its peak then.
Nowadays, a jack-o'-lantern is a classic symbol of Halloween, but the cartoonish
depictions of a grimacing gourd don't really speak to the dark legend behind its origin.
"Ah, you didn't tell me you were gonna kill it!" Most versions of the jack-o'-lantern legends
center on a tricky man named, obviously enough, Jack. An Irish version of the legend refers to the
man as Stingy Jack for his overly thrifty nature. This Jack was an incredible penny-pincher, and for
some reason, he invited the Devil to drink with him. Jack managed to get the fiend to transform
into a coin to settle the tab. He quickly pocketed the devil-coin next to a silver cross,
only releasing the demon on the promise that he wouldn't claim Jack's soul when the man died.
That worked fine at first. The Devil kept his promise upon Jack's death
and left the man alone. Yet, it turned out that God didn't want him either,
leaving Jack to wander the earth as a spirit.
At least the Devil gave Jack a hollowed-out turnip with a lump of glowing coal to light his way.
As Irish people began to immigrate to America, the legend came with them. And it turned out that the
New World crop of pumpkins was much more plentiful and suitable to carve than a hard old turnip.
Thus, the gourd-based jack-o'-lantern was born.
The tradition of wearing Halloween costumes may go back to the days of Samhain when
disguising yourself had both a religious and a practical purpose. Costumes worn around this
time of year were meant to help wearers avoid scrutiny from wandering spirits.
The disguises usually employed skins, horns, and other preserved animal bits to conceal the wearer
and help them fit in with otherworldly entities. As the holiday adapted, those costumes also
helped conceal the identity of pranksters who tormented people in their community.
And, conveniently enough, they could often blame the mischief on ghosts.
As Christians began to move into Celtic regions, Samhain slowly began to transition
to a less ritualistic version of itself, with the faithful expected to spend the
next day in religious observance. But costuming continued, with some people going door to door,
begging for treats like soul cakes in exchange for offering up their prayers for departed souls.
Bats are actually a pretty helpful
member of the ecosystem that devour annoying insects, but they also have a spooky reputation
and very often turn up in Halloween decorations. True to their nature, some bats may have been
attracted to the tasty insects drawn by Samhain bonfires. Many bat species are also nocturnal,
further increasing their supposed association with ghosts, pagan deities, and the underworld.
It's unsurprising that in the popular imagination,
they have gone from an innocuous flying mammal to a harbinger of Halloween tidings.
Meanwhile, the witchy reputation of black cats made them an easy fit for the spooky holiday.
After all, how often do you see a ginger or tabby cat in a Halloween display?
The association between Halloween and black cats may have started in the Middle Ages when people
were often frantically working to root out evil witches in their midst. Black cats, with their
eerie dark coats, were frequently associated with evildoers working at night. Some even believed
that black cats were witches who had the power of transformation at their disposal. Soon enough,
this particular variety of feline gained an eerie reputation. It spread even further when European
immigrants took their tales and traditions across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.
Trick or treating seems like a pretty sweet deal,
all things considered. A cute little kid dresses up in a costume, goes door to door, and gets candy
in exchange for the phrase "trick or treat." "We should do this every year!"
"I just wish we hadn't filled up on all those kids before we got to the Flanders'."
But, in medieval Europe, that interaction was more of a two-way street,
at least spiritually speaking. And someone's very soul could hang in the balance.
Trick or treating has its roots in a begging practice that's known under a variety of names,
including "souling" and "guising." Richer folks would receive the poor of their communities and
give them soul cakes, a special seasonal pastry. Those who received the cakes then promised to
pray for the souls of the house's dead relatives. Eventually, kids started to take up the practice
and added in costumes and song-and-dance routines. Instead of receiving a cake, they might receive
other food, money, or even a nip of ale.
It turns out that the Great Depression has more of a hand in contemporary Halloween
celebrations than you may expect. Even when you go to a haunted house attraction these days,
there's a hint of its history among the jump scares and grotesque characters.
It all started when Halloween pranks got out of hand in the early days of the Great Depression.
With youths going so far as to flip cars and nearly derail trains with their antics,
adults decided that something must be done. The kids needed a more controlled distraction. Enter
the haunted house, one of any number of organized Halloween festivities that included trails,
parades, and trick-or-treat events. The reasoning went that if the kids were in an organized haunted
house, then they couldn't be tearing the town to pieces. And, if a local nonprofit
got to make a bit of money off it, all the better. Maybe this seems rather cheesy to modern viewers,
especially those who are used to the intense, professionally produced haunted attractions
available today. But even these gentler haunted houses were better than some community's ideas
to completely ban Halloween fun altogether. Some cities seriously considered the idea. However,
they realized that the angry trick or treaters might prove to be too much to deal with in the
face of such an extreme measure.
If annoying and even dangerous pranksters weren't enough to stop Halloween, World War II was, at
least for a short time. In 1942, Chicago and some other cities did cancel Halloween celebrations,
and not strictly because of all those wild pranksters. Instead, it was because of increasing
restrictions on resources during wartime. Patriotism also came into play. One superintendent
of schools in Rochester wrote that even the seemingly innocuous prank of soaping up someone's
windows wasn't all that great. After all, didn't our boys overseas need that soap and grease more?
And ringing doorbells and then running away was just another way to make the life of an exhausted
wartime factory employee all the more tiresome. So, kids were even pushed to take pledges
to behave themselves, promising to back the fighting men by observing Halloween in wholesome,
squeaky-clean fashion. This meant that for a while at least, the mailboxes and front porches
of local homes were safe.
The night before Halloween is often called Mischief Night in New Jersey. It's also
ominously known as Devil's Night in Detroit. And, confusingly to outsiders, it’s called
Cabbage Night in parts of the northeastern United States. The evening has historically represented
an opportunity for widespread misbehavior and destruction. And, while many might like to
blame it all on rotten kids, there's a more concrete social and historical explanation.
Mischief and pranking neighbors have been a part of Halloween since its beginnings as a
Celtic ritual. One especially awful trick in 19th century Scotland involved setting
a smoldering cabbage stalk up against a keyhole so that the unfortunate homeowner
would arrive at a house reeking of burned veggies. Immigrants brought these traditions to the U.S.,
and the mischief really seemed to ramp up to frantic levels in the 1930s.
Some historians have argued that the increasing stresses of the Great Depression and World War
II, could have pushed some youths to act out. "Every Halloween, after all the parents get drunk,
the teenagers come out and they go freaking crazy! They ride around town on their bikes,
vandalize stuff…"
While kids were out turning the town upside down for much of modern Halloween history,
young adults were tasked with something far more significant: finding a spouse. Even
though Halloween was a mostly secular holiday in the U.S., autumn was still a time of year where
people felt more inclined to fortune-telling. And many anxious young romantics in Europe and the
Americas used apples to do so. It makes sense considering the long link between fruit and
fertility, and the fact that apples are pretty abundant at the close of the harvest season.
Apple bobbing was a way for people to get a hint at a future match. In some cases,
young women would make a secret mark in an apple. The apples would be collected and then dropped
into a large bucket of water. The hopeful women would then watch the men stick their heads in
the bucket and come out with an apple in their mouths. The girl who made the mark was said to
be matched with the boy who retrieved the apple. Another apple-based fortune-telling technique
involved peeling. Hopeful women would attempt to peel an apple in one continuous piece.
They’d then toss the scrap over their shoulder. They were looking for the peel to fall in the
shape of someone’s initials. The idea here is that the formed initials would supposedly
indicate the name of their true love.
While trick or treating may now seem like a pretty harmless childhood tradition,
some busybodies have argued that it's extortion. Whether or not you agree,
the practice does kind of look that way when it's considered in a certain light. After all,
the practice does involve kids asking for candy as a form of protection money.
Consider what might happen to the front of your home if you're stingy with the candy,
or especially if you commit the ultimate Halloween sin of handing out something awful
like dental floss. It's certainly more of a one-way street. Though you could always ask
the kids to pray for souls stuck in Purgatory if you're feeling a bit old-school. At least they'd
be doing some extra work for all that sugar. This distrust between trick or treaters and
candy-distributing adults may have its roots in the 1930s when tricking was definitely more
popular for some than scrounging for treats. There are accounts of people suffering from
tipped-over trashcans and destroyed birdbaths when they ran out of candy for trick or treaters.
And some alarmist newspapers even went so far as to claim that the rougher sort of trick or
treaters were just future gangsters.
For many observant religious people, Halloween is the "Devil's holiday," and feared because
of its pagan associations. As Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe and the Americas,
it had a vested interest in demonizing the old gods. Some early Christian practices folded the
pagan observances into its calendar. For instance, when, in the 8th century, Pope Gregory III moved
All Saints' Day from May 13 to November 1 in an attempt to put a Christian gloss on the spookiest
time of year. However, quite a few Protestants felt that this was still too close for comfort,
especially as the latter half of the 20th century saw the rise in evangelical Christianity.
Starting in the 20th century, some Christians even went so far as to have anti-Halloween
parades and attractions known as hell houses that graphically depicted the consequences of sin.
Some hell houses do not hold back, warning of the bloody, satanic perils of issues such as
drunk driving and domestic abuse, as well as more divisive topics such as gay marriage and abortion.
Despite the dire warnings from these groups, most people in the U.S. still see Halloween as a fun,
silly holiday where a lot of candy is consumed, and a few tricks are performed.
It’s a far cry from its darker, ritualistic, and more sinister origins.
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