Note—Revised and back
by popular demand! It’s the seventh
annual appearance of this holiday classic.
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 four festivals that fell between the Solstices and Equinoxes and
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 to the New World, but Halloween does not seem to have been widely
celebrated colonial America. The Puritans
spent a lot of time trying to squelch other pagan customs like the 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.
 |
| Vintage Halloween post card features a witch, black cat, and Jack o' Lantern. |
In
fact there is little mention of Halloween in America until the late second half
of the 19th Century. By the 1880’s and ‘90’s greeting card companies were printing
colorful post cards featuring images
of witches, black cats, skeletons, and pumpkin Jack o’ Lanterns—all of the classic images associated with Halloween. Period
photos from around the turn of the
20th Century show both adults and children in costumes, most commonly some
variation of witch or ghost themes.
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. The ritual begging in costumes and general
hooliganism more closely resembled rural Irish Wren Day—St. Stephen’s Day December 26—customs than those
celebrated in either England or Scotland.
Rowdism by boys and young men was reported in big
cities and small towns alike and
often included setting small bonfires
of junk in roadways; tipping or stealing out houses; pelting houses with eggs, rotten vegetables, or manure; letting horses and livestock loose
from barns and pens; and sometime blocking
chimneys so that houses would fill
with smoke. Sometime significant
damage was done.
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. It combined the ritual begging with toned down tricks that were a little
less extreme than the wild rampages reported
earlier. 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 Treaters circa 1950 just before the era of cheap pajama style costumes. Note child in Black face. |
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.
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 relief.
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.
 |
| Halloween is increasingly an occasion for adult revelry. |
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.
