By
Francesca Chilargi
Staff Writer
WWW, 2006 (Archived) - Each year,
millions of children and adults happily play
dress-up and go trick-or-treating for candy
on Halloween. Halloween is the second most
celebrated holiday, Christmas being the most
celebrated, which rakes in $6 billion
annually. But where did this annual
celebration originate? Is it a celebration
of devil worship?
One student from India said Halloween
doesn’t exist in his country, but he
thinks Americans celebrate Halloween as part
of a new start.
“It’s [Halloween] getting rid of your
bad elements and starting a new cycle,”
said Sudarsan Desikan, 27, a manufacturing
engineering major.
However, in India, they have their own
festivals to acknowledge farmers who work
year-round and each festival has its history
and story, according to Desikan.
Vejaiy Subramanian, 23, also from India,
who’s working on his master’s degree in
mechanical engineering, said he’s not sure
why Americans celebrate Halloween.
Subramanian and friends however, gather
together each year to have fun and celebrate
Halloween.
The word “Halloween” comes from the
Catholic Church and it’s a contraction of
“All Hallows Eve” or “All Saints
Day,” a Catholic observance day to honor
the saints created in the 800s by Pope
Boniface IV.
In Celtic Ireland during the fifth century
B.C., the Celts summer ended on Oct. 31 and
a holiday called Samhin, meaning the Celtic
New Year, began, according to www.Wilstar.com,
a Web site devoted to the customs of
holidays.
The story says the dead spirits of those who
died a year before would come back looking
for bodies to possess for the following year
— their only hope for afterlife.
The Celts practiced a pagan religion known
as Druidism, according to Wonderful World
Tomorrow, a Christian organization.
The Celtic priests and wizards called the
Druids, were well-educated in astrology and
magic. During Samhin, the Druids built large
bonfires and often human sacrifices were
executed, a practice to honor the Druid
gods, according to WWT.
The Celts “believed all laws of space and
time were suspended during this time,
allowing the spirit world to intermingle
with the living.”
In order to protect themselves, the
villagers would put out the fires in their
homes to make them cold and undesirable.
Then, they would dress up in ghosts’
customs and loudly walk around the town
behaving in a destructive manner to frighten
the spirits.
Some people would leave bowls of food
outside their homes hoping the ghosts would
be content with that and wouldn’t come in,
according to WWT.
According to Wilstar.com, the Celts would
burn someone at the stake who was believed
to be possessed by a spirit to make an
example of the person for the spirits.
However, in the first century A.D., the
Romans copied the Celtic rituals as their
own and included some of their own
celebrations as a part of the Samhin
holiday, which still occurred in October.
During the month of October, the Romans
honored Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit
and trees, on a certain day. Pomona’s
symbol was the apple, which might be the
reason for the modern day tradition of
bobbing for apples on Halloween, according
to Wilstar.com.
Over time, the practices changed and the
belief of spirit body possession faded —
while dressing up like ghosts became more a
traditional role.
During colonial times, the people
participated in ghost-telling and pranks
such as tipping over outhouses and unhinging
fence gates.
In the 1840s, Irish immigrants introduced
Halloween to Americans. Americans would
dress up in costumes and walk from door to
door asking for food or money, according to
WWT. Over time, children began the practice
of asking for food or money from door to
door on Halloween.
The trick-or-treating custom originated in
the ninth century from a European custom
called souling, according to Wilstar.com. On
Nov. 2, the day of “All Souls Day,”
Christians would walk to different villages
asking for “soul cakes,” a square piece
of bread with currants.
The more “soul cakes” beggars would
receive, the more prayers they could say for
the givers’ deceased loved ones. The souls
of the dead would remain in an indeterminate
state and prayers, even by strangers, would
rush the souls to heaven.
Another custom associated with Halloween is
the pumpkin or carving out faces to create
the jack-o-lantern placed outside houses.
The jack-o-lantern comes from an Irish
folktale of a man named Jack who was drunk.
Jack tricked Satan into climbing a tree and
carved an image of a cross in the tree
cornering the devil.
After Jack died, he couldn’t enter Heaven
because of his wicked ways, and he
couldn’t go into Hell either since he
tricked the devil. So the devil gave Jack an
ember to light his way through the darkness,
according to Wilstar.com. The ember was
inside an empty turnip to keep it gleaming
longer.
The Irish used turnips as their
jack-o-lanterns, but when they came to
America they found more pumpkins available
than turnips, which
created the lighted hollow jack-o-lantern
pumpkins used today.
Some people believe the Halloween custom
originated from pagan rituals or devil
worships. In fact, the holiday developed
from the Celts celebrating their new year
and from Europeans’ prayer rituals from
medieval times.
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