Each year, to mark the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the long, cold winter ahead, ancient Celtic nobles assembled for a grand feast. Not ones to miss out on the fun, friendly spirits and ghosts were known to join in the frivolity, sometimes returning in the form of animals, such as crows and cats.
"As in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, ghosts love coming for special holidays," said Hans Broedel, visiting assistant professor of history. "Celebrations around the Celtic New Year, which later became All Saints Day and then All Souls Day, give us our first glimpse of today's Halloween."
In early modern times, the tradition continued as All Hollows Eve, a pagan holiday honoring the dead. In an attempt to legitimize the ritual, the Roman Catholic Church created All Saints Day celebrated on November 1 to honor Christian saints, and later All Souls Day celebrated on November 2, to recognize souls of all Christian dead. Children celebrated by "soul-caking" or going door-to-door begging for tiny pastries. In return for each tasty treat, the children promised to say a prayer for each family's departed loved ones. These prayers would help the relatives find their way out of purgatory and into heaven.
Adding the "trick" component to soul-caking and donning costumes began in the 16th or 17th century when pranksters found the supernatural elements of All Souls Day the perfect opportunity to frighten people.
Broedel, who is working on a forthcoming book on witches and witchcraft treatises in late medieval Germany, explained that the association of fear with Halloween stems from the Celtic belief that once a year the deceased were permitted to return to earth. "Ghosts in the form of people, such as those we see in movies, are a contemporary phenomenon," he said. "All except the grumpiest, scariest medieval 'ghosts' who were called 'revenants' and were the animated corpses of the returning dead."
Witches were a 15th-century creation and at first took the form of their "familiars" -- cats, bugs and toads. The notion of a witch as a woman who flies through the night, with the big hat, green face and evil agenda is relatively recent folklore, he added. Broedel explains that although many misconceptions about medieval spiritual life are rampant today -- especially the notion that Halloween has its roots in the satanic -- some Celtic Halloween practices have been preserved, such as jack-o-lanterns, but with a bit of a twist. "Children carved jack-o-lanterns out of turnips," Broedel said. "One of the nice things about jack-o-lanterns made from turnips is that you can actually use them as lanterns. Children suspended the carved roots from strings or forked sticks and carried them around when they went out at night."
But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful, and, as Broedel pointed out, "Pumpkins are hollow and easy to carve -- clearly a superior jack-o-lantern technology."
A few Halloween facts from www.howstuffworks.lycoszone.com:
"According to the National Confectioners Association, Halloween is the number-one holiday for candy sales, beating out Christmas, Easter and Valentine's Day. The NCA estimates that candy manufacturers bring in close to $2 billion in Halloween candy sales each year. Typically, more than 85 percent of U.S. households hand out candy Halloween night."
"In the United States, Halloween lags just behind New Year's Eve and the Super Bowl in total number of parties, and it's second only to Christmas in total consumer dollars spent. According to the National Retail Federation, kids and adults combined spent more than $1.5 billion on Halloween costumes in 2000."
"In the last 50 years, greeting cards have become a major part of celebrating Halloween. The first Halloween cards were sold in the early 1900s, and the idea has really taken hold since then. With more than 24 million Halloween cards sent every year, the holiday is now the eighth most popular card-sending occasion in the United States (according to Hallmark Cards)."
