Halloween’s History: The Origins (Part 2)

           Hi! Today I’m going to talk about “Halloween” in our days and the role that accomplished this celebration in the creation of the “Feast of all Saints” (November 1st ) and the “All Souls” day (November 2nd ), so this post is considered as the second part of this topic and it starts like this…

          At the last post, it was mentioned that the Christian Church wanted to substitute the Samhain with another holiday so that’s why they decided to create the “Feast of all Saints” or “All Hallows Day”, assigned to November 1st. This holiday was formed to celebrate and honor all Christian saints but especially for all that saints that don’t have a special day to be celebrated; however, finally, this holiday didn’t achieved to replaced Samhain but something started to happen: the Celts deities started to be substituted for fairies and leprechauns. Later, the church tried again to suppress the Samhain by creating a new holiday that is the “All Souls Day”, assigned to November 2nd. This holiday was meant to pray for the souls of all those people who have already died, however this didn’t worked again.

          Time passed by and the “All Saints Day” became the “All Hallows Eve Day” but with ancient Celtic traditions. People continued to celebrate this day but as a time for wandering dead and evil supernatural beings. Later, it began to be celebrated the “All Hallows Evening Day” which is considered as the “Halloween” that we already know today. This day started to be used to transmit the message that death is part of life, it started to be said that the souls and fantastic creatures such as fairies, witches, and demons were roaming that day and that’s why it began the use of costumes in order to ask for treats.
          Well, that’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed this post and I wish you to return next week!

Note: All the information shown above was taken from the work that is at the bibliography....

Works Cited

Santino, Jack. Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows. September 1982. 22 September 2011 <http://www.loc.gov/folklife/halloween.html>.

Halloween’s History: The Origins (Part 1)

                Hi, dear readers. Last week I talked about “Harry Potter Series” and how its huge impact in literature and our society. As stated in the last post, I was thinking to talk about Halloween, a holiday that is celebrated on October 31st. We already know that during this day people decide to get dressed with unusual costumes such as: devils, witches, angels and vampires among others; little kids knock doors to ask for candies, TV channels transmit scary movies, and houses are decorated with pumpkins or scary objects but, how this celebration started? What was the purpose of creating this holiday? Well, these are just few of the answers that are going to be solved today. I have found a very interesting article that is called “Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows” written by Jack Santino, he shows very interesting facts about this holiday, so all the information that I’m going to display here is from this source.

                First of all, it is very important to know that “Halloween” was created by the Celts, the same tribe that started to use wizardry. This pagan celebration had also the name of Samhain, it was considered as the “festival of the death”, and it was the most important holiday for the Celts. This tribe believed that, during the day of Samhain, the ghosts or souls of people who had already died were allowed to travel to our world. It was a tradition to sacrifice animals, collect fruits and vegetables, and even to turn on bonfires to honor dead people in order to keep them away from the people who are still alive. But how does this celebration became the Halloween? Well, it started to be Halloween when missionaries of the Christian churches tried to change the religious practices of the Celts.

                The missionaries considered this festival as a pagan practice and that it was related to the devil, so that’s why they decided to place Christian holidays at the same time as the Celtic holidays. Pagan Celts, which later started to be called as “Druids”, began to be considered as evil people that were part of the “Christian hell” and this is the part where it gets involved the wizardry topic because Christians started to tell them that they were “witches” for the fact that they believed in supernatural creatures and practiced sorcery.

                Well, that’s everything for today. Next week I’m going to continue with this topic and I will talk about Halloween in our days and the role that accomplished this celebration in the creation of the Feast of all Saints (November 1st ) and the All Souls day (November 2nd ).

Works Cited

Santino, Jack. Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows. September 1982. 22 September 2011 <http://www.loc.gov/folklife/halloween.html>.

Magic in Harry Potter

Hi, everybody! Well… I was thinking last week about a topic that it would be interesting to talk about here in my blog. I thought that it would be nice to talk about Halloween, a celebration that is very common in the United States, but then I decided to change that topic for the next week ;) Today I’m going to talk about… Harry Potter! One of the most famous book series in our times and even it is a great example of fantastic literature in which wizardry and magic is involved but first of all I’m going to talk a little bit about Joanne Rowling (known as “J.K. Rowling”), the author of this magical story.

            J.K. Rowling is a British author who was born in 1965, she started to be interested in literature when she wrote “Rabbit”, her first short story that was about a rabbit that got the measles and some of his friends went to visit him. The shocking thing of this is that she wrote this story when she was five or six years old so she showed her interest of writing since she was very little. Rowling came up with the idea for Harry Potter when she was twenty-five years old while delayed on a train that was going from Manchester to London, she didn’t had anything to write but she tried to remember the idea and finally, five years ago, she started to write all the ideas that she wanted to show in each of her books (Bloomsbury Publishing, harrypotter.bloomsbury.com).

            Probably everyone perfectly knows what Harry Potter series are about but I’m going to give a quickly review about it: Harry is a boy who lived with his terrible uncles and his cousin Dudley, aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon told him that his parents died on a car accident but, when Harry turns eleven, he receives a letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since that moment, Harry met Hagrid who tells him that he is a wizard, that his parents were wizards too but that they were killed by a dark wizard called “Lord Voldemort”. Harry goes to Hogwarts, meets Dumbledore and his best friends (Ron and Hermione), learns how to be a wizard, and he gets in charge of defeating Voldemort (Barnes & Noble, barnesandnoble.com) through all the seven books.

            In my opinion, the most amazing thing of all this story is that J.K. Rowling created a whole new world based on that myths and knowledge that she knew about wizards, witches, and magic. She created new characters with magical abilities and even adopted some characters that were already known on history (for example: Nicolas Flamel); she created a huge list of spells and fantastic creatures; Rowling also created a new sport for her story and it’s called “Quiddich”. All that facts can be considered as important because they give value to Rowling’s work, that’s why I think she has a huge amount of followers: her creativity involved several human minds. I really recommend you to read them if you are a lover of fantastic literature. In my opinion and with my personal experiences, I can say that this kind of books are really good to develop our imagination (:

            Thank you for reading my blog! Next week I’m going to talk about how wizardry and magic had had an influence in cultural aspects…

Works Cited

Barnes & Noble. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ." 2011. Barnes & Noble.com. 14 september 2011 <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-j-k-rowling/1100036321>.

Bloomsbury Publishing. "Biography." 2011. Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling. 14 september 2011 <http://harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/author>.