The History of Halloween

Halloween Symbols

Halloween is a holiday that is based around embracing scary things, particularly those involving death, the undead, "evil" magic, and mythical monsters. It is a liminal or threshold occasion, when the distinctions between the daylight world of reason and the spectral nightworld are blurred.

Commonly-associated Halloween "characters" include ghosts, witches, black cats, goblins, banshees, zombies, and demons, as well as certain literary figures such as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.

Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. There are also elements of the autumn season reflected in symbols of Halloween, such as pumpkins and scarecrows.

Jack O'Lantern

The jack o'lantern is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. In Britain and Ireland, a turnip was, and sometimes still is, used but emigrants to America quickly adopted the pumpkin since it is much easier to carve. Families that celebrate Halloween will carve a pumpkin into a scary or comical face, and place a candle inside the hollowed out shell, creating a crude lantern. This is then placed on the home's doorstep on Halloween night in order to scare evil spirits away.

A variant of a Jack o'Lantern carried on a string is a feature of Punkie Night, celebrated the fourth Thursday of October in the village of Hinton St. George, Somerset. (In England, Celtic customs and language have lingered longest in the southwest.) For Punkie Night, children carry lanterns made from hollowed-out mangel-wurzels (these days pumpkins are used) with faces cut out of them around the village boundary, collecting money and singing the punkie song. Punkie is derived from pumpkin or punk, meaning tinder. Though the custom is only attested over the last century, and the mangel wurzel itself was introduced into English agriculture in the later 18th century, "Punkie Night" appears to be much older, older even than the fable that now accounts for it, in which the wives of Hinton St. George went looking for their wayward husbands at the fair held nearby at Chiselborough, the last Thursday in October, but first hollowed out mangel wurzels in order to make lanterns to light their way. The laboriously improvised lanterns are not so easily explained, but the reaction of drunken husbands to the eerie lights is perhaps more telling: they immediately identified the lights as "goolies," the restless spirits of children who had died before they were baptized,&mdash and fled in terror! Children carry the punkies now. The event has spread since ca 1960 to the neighboring village of Chiselborough.

Trick or Treating

The main event of Halloween is trick-or-treating, or guising, in which children dress up in costume disguises, and go door-to-door in their neighbourhood, ringing the bell and yelling "trick or treat!" or "Halloween apples!" The occupant of the house then gives the child some small candies, miniature chocolate bars or other individually wrapped treats. Children can often accumulate quite a lot of treats on Halloween night, filling up entire pillow cases or shopping bags.

Typical Halloween costumes have traditionally been monsters such as vampires, ghosts, witches, and devils. In recent years however, more contemporary costume ideas have also become popular, such as dressing up as a character from a popular TV show or movie. It's not uncommon for Halloween participants to celebrate by wearing costumes related to a specific theme or time. In 2001, after the September 11 Attacks, for example, costumes of firefighters, police officers, and US military personnel became popular amongst children.

Trick or Treating usually ends when a child enters his or her teenage years. Teenagers and adults instead often celebrate Halloween with costume parties or other social get-togethers.

Cultural History of Halloween (Part 2)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Halloween".