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>.