 |
| Durids, who probably did not look like this, built bonfires on Samhain. |
I am
guessing that readers of this blog are probably more familiar with the origins
and development of Halloween than
most folks. But for review:
Halloween
traces its origin to the Celtic
harvest festival Samhain. It was one of the quarter festivals that fell between the Solstices and Equinoxes which
celebrated the natural turning of the seasons.
Samhain was particularly important because it was the gate in time to the death and
starvation season of winter, as well
a time to celebrate the recent harvest.
This
association with the death of winter also extended to the spirit world, which was considered to be closer to the mortal plane than at any other time of
the year. The Celtic priests—the Druids—marked
the occasion with the lighting of bon
fires and gifts of food and drink for the spirits of the dead. Some consider it also analogous to a New Year’s Celebration launching a new
cycle of the seasons. It was popularly
celebrated by the peasantry long
after the Druids passed and well into the Christian
era.
Too
popular to squelch, as with many pagan
observances Catholic Church co-opted
the custom as All Saints Day on
November 1. In rural regions especially Samhain customs continued
to be observed on the evening before the Holy Day—which came to be known as All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en
in Scots.
Immigrants from the British Isles brought some of their customs with them, but
Halloween does not seem to have been widely celebrated. The Puritans
spent a lot of time trying to squelch May
Pole dances associated with the spring
Celtic festival of Bealtaine, but for all of their obsession with witchcraft, usually associated with those who continued to keep the
old pagan traditions, there is no
evidence of suppressing Samhain or Halloween.
In
fact there is little mention of Halloween in American at all until the late
years of the 19th Century when a few
scattered newspapers began reporting ritual
begging on Halloween by masked youths accompanied by general hooliganism, threats, and acts of vandalism. This was probably introduced by the wave of
poor “country” Irish immigrants that
began after the Potato Famine and
continued through most of the rest of the century.
As
it spread, customs for observing the holiday varied regionally. Parties with games such as bobbing for apples
and the telling of ghost stories were fairly common. The custom of trick or treating seems to have spread slowly. What progress it was making was largely
interrupted by the Depression years
when families had little extra money to spend on treats and by the sugar rationing of World War II.
Trick
or treating was still far from universal until after World War II when it became a topic of popular radio programs like
the Jack
Benny Show and Ozzie and Harriet. A Halloween episode in the movie Meet
Me in Saint Louis was one of the first portrayals of children’s customs
associated with the holiday on the screen.
 |
| By the mid '50s the relatively new custom of children Trick or Treating felt like an old tradition. |
In
1947 the popular children’s magazine Jack and Jill published a story on
the custom of Halloween begging and described it in detail, spreading the
practice widely and with amazing uniformity.
By 1951 the practice was wide spread enough that a Philadelphia woman, Mary
Emma Allison and the Reverend Clyde Allison decided to channel the energy to
constructive purposes by introducing Trick
or Treat for UNICEF to support the work of the United Nation’s international children’s work.
By
the mid 1950’s with the strong support of the candy companies and the
introduction of cheap masks and pajama style costumes for children, the
practice of trick or treating had become ubiquitous and had even taken on a
feeling of a long standing practice.
What
started with ghost stories and the
like, soon spread to all types of horror,
fueled by the growing popularity of increasingly violent Hollywood films. Gore became and more and more common
theme and showing horror films for
the whole month of October in theaters and on TV was standard by the early 1970’s.
 |
| Adults now party hard and embrace the masquerade elements of Halloween. |
About
the same time the first generations of trick or treaters grew up but continued
to enjoy the dress-up and parties of Halloween.
It is, year by year, an increasingly popular adult holiday, incorporating many of the features of various world masquerade festivals with macabre
twist.
Halloween
is now the second most widely celebrated holiday in the United States and is an economic powerhouse, generating sales
second only to Christmas. Popular American media have spread the
customs of trick or treating and celebrating gore around the world, often
supplanting truly ancient celebrations of Halloween in the Celtic countries.
The
resurgence of Christian Fundamentalism
in the U.S. has led to a counter movement to strip the “Satanic” festival from public schools and the wider community. Although they get it wrong—there was never
any connection between Satanism and
Halloween—the fundies, ironically,
at least recognized a religious tradition hiding under the commercial
hoopla.
At
the same time re-invented “traditional” paganism like Wicca, one of the most rapidly growing religious movements of the last twenty years, has striven to
recapture the nearly lost significance of the holiday’s roots in Samhain.
Go
thou, and celebrate as thou wouldst.
