Halloween or Hallowe’en is an annual festival which is celebrated on October 31st and is a very popular holiday in many parts of the world. It’s the first of the end of year holidays, before Thanksgiving and December. Just like other popular celebrations it has become commercialized and also nearly all people do not know the much about Halloween and also how it began.

Nearly all of the customs that are practiced today on Halloween were in fact introduced to America by Irish immigrants who celebrated The feast of samhain, a Celtic harvest festival. Samhain is the celebration of the lighter half of the year and also the beginning of the darker half and sometimes this is often called the Celtic New Year.

Most of historians also say that Halloween had its origins in Roman times from the Roman Feast Pomona, the Goddess of fruits and also seeds. Everything that we carry out in the present day on Halloween is entrenched in many ways to the ancient Celtic practice no matter how detached today’s practices may be different from the original.

How did Halloween get its name?

The information concerning Halloween show that it wasn’t always known as Halloween. In fact many say the appropriate spelling should be Hallowe’en. The very first form of Halloween was the Celtic festival Samhain. Samhain marked the end of the harvest period and also a time when pagans stocked up on winter supplies and also slaughtered livestock.

Halloween’s name comes from the truncated version of the word All-hallow-even, a day that the majority European countries celebrated events akin to Samhain. This is why Halloween is also recognized as All Hallows Eve. On the other hand Samhain is the festival that’s obviously the origin of Halloween with a main portion of the festival to do with the belief that this was the day the lines between the living and the dead blurred.

Dressing Up

The details about Halloween costumes come from this belief that Samhain was a day when the veil between the worlds were thinner and that the living and the dead crossed paths. The Celtic Traditions where spirits of the deceased were thought to be able to bring about disease and injury among people and also bring about damage to crops. Dressing up in costumes was primarily to ward off evil and also people would be dressed in disguises and also masks to copy the dead spirits. This was considered enough to fool the spirits that the people were actually deceased and also to avoid harm. This has now evolved into a enjoyment filled ritual with people not worrying a lot about how menacing or dead they look.

How Halloween Is Celebrated Today – Pumpkins and also Trick or Treating

Why are pumpkins associated with Halloween? Carving pumpkins is another ritual that began, according to the facts concerning Halloween, from Celtic customs. In Ireland families carved lanterns from turnips and also rutabagas to keep away evil spirits. When Irish families moved to America they used pumpkins as an alternative since they were more effortlessly available and a lot easier to carve.

In the old days throughout Halloween, people in Ireland would go from home to house begging for food gifts for a banquet in the town center. Now, children dress up in costumes and go around the area trick or treating, begging for chocolate or cash.