History of Halloween in America
The History of Halloween in America that we know today all started a long time ago along the beautiful landscapes and rocky ridges of Ireland. There were a tribe of warriors called the Celts, who inhabited the British Isle and Northern France over 2,000 years ago. These people were deep rooted and formed an agricultural community.
As the harsh winters approached the Celts celebrated their new year on November 1. This day commemorated the end of summer harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter. There was a belief among the people that the transition between life and death was very thin. During this time Spirts, the souls of the dead could journey freely between the two worlds. This magical time that represented the transition between summer and winter was called Samhain. On October 31 the ghost of the dead were know to walk the earth once again.
To please these spirits the Celts would leave food and drink out. The Druids, or Celtic priests, would take advantage of these beliefs to make predictions about the future. For a country entirely dependent on the explosive natural world, these prognostications were a significant source of solace and counsel during the long, cold winters. Samhain was know as the best night to predict the future.
To memorialize the event, Druids assembled large sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. The Druids would solely determine who would be sacrificed to the Gods to bring them good luck in the coming new year.
During the festivity, the Celts wore costumes, usually consisting of animal heads and skins, and tried to tell each others fortunes. After the celebration, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had snuffed out earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
During the same time ancient Romans celebrated a night of worship called Pomona, laying out apples and the tradition of “bobbing” for apples came about. This is still practiced today at Halloween parties all across the world.
By 50 B.C, the Romans had conquered most of the Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain and Pomona.
Soon after a new force bitterly opposed to anything pagan was taking root across Europe. Samhain and Pomona would be pitted against Christianity.
By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, the Catholic Pope Boniface IV assigned November 1 All Saints’ Day, which was a time to observe saints and martyrs.
In modern theory today, the pope was trying to replace the Celtic festival that worshiped the dead with a more church friendly or sanctioned holiday.
The word Halloween came from the Middle English meaning of Alholowmesse which is All Saints’ Day. Since they started celebrating the evening before it was named All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween traditions with them. The intolerant Protestant belief systems that defined early New England, celebration of Halloween in colonial times was exceedingly restrained there.
As the beliefs and traditions of dissimilar European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians, interlocked, a distinctly American adaptation of Halloween began to come forth. The first festivities included “play parties,” public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share accounts of the dead, tell one another fortunes, dance, and sing. Colonial Halloween celebrations also featured the telling of ghost tales and mischief of all sorts. By the middle of the nineteenth century, yearly fall festivities were frequent, but Halloween wasn’t celebrated everywhere in the country.
Later in the nineteenth century as new immigrants came to America the celebration of Halloween flourished. Americans began to adopt and dress up in home made costumes. The tradition of going from house to house asking for food or money eventually became know as our modern day trick-or-treat custom.
In the later part of the 1800s, Americans began to mold Halloween into a holiday tradition more about community and neighborly get-together, than the walking of the dead or ghosts, and witchcraft.
Today Halloween parties are common place for both children and adults. Parties centered games, foods of the season, wild and crazy costumes. There has been a trend from the community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. However you can still visit the local haunted houses with mid evil characters such as witches, goblins and beheaded bodies. The religious overtones have been for the most part removed from the typical Halloween celebration. This new American tradition continues to grow. Nowadays, Americans spend an estimated $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday.
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