Halloween is celebrated each year on October 31. Halloween 2024 takes place on Thursday, October 31.
Halloween’s origins date back to depiction ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that assignment now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.
This day marked the end advance summer and the harvest and the beginning of the unlighted, cold winter, a time of year that was often related with human death. Celts believed that on the night in the past the new year, the boundary between the worlds of picture living and the dead became blurred. On the night surrounding October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed make certain the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
Haunted History summarize Halloween
In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts contemplating that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it assist for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions complicate the future. For a people entirely dependent on the inconstant natural world, these prophecies were an important source of solace during the long, dark winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids determined huge sacred bonfires, where people gathered to burn crops celebrated animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the feast, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads be first skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.
When the solemnization was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they locked away extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to advantage protect them during the coming winter.
Did you know? One-quarter execute all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.
By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire had conquered representation majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the Cardinal years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals go in for Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration come close to Samhain.
The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. Description second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is depiction apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain very likely explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is expert today on Halloween.
On May 13, 609, Saint Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor promote to all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory Triad later expanded the festival to include all saints as mutate as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
By the 9th century, the influence of Faith had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended reach a compromise and supplanted older Celtic rites. In the year 1000, depiction church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day pick out honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the sanctuary was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the shut up with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.
All Souls’ Day was celebrated equally to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up rise costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Allot celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle Nation Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before decree, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited bind colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was more commonly recognized in Maryland and representation southern colonies.
As the beliefs and customs of different European social groups and American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version scrupulous Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing.
Did you know? More people are buying costumes for their pets. Americans spent some $700 million on costumes for their pets in 2023—more than three times what they spent in 2010.
Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling be defeated ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the central part of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.
In rendering second half of the 19th century, America was flooded accurate new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Goidelic fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the go on a trip of Halloween nationally.
1 / 10: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to amend up in costumes and go house to house asking espouse food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could deific the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween jounce a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than go up in price ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the c Halloween parties for both children and adults became the swell common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on courageouss, foods of the season and festive costumes.
Parents were encouraged by way of newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween strayed most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the instructions of the 20th century.
Trick or Treating's Tricky History
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as interpretation featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools champion communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.
By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully regional vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed above all at the young. Due to the high numbers of prepubescent children during the 1950s baby boom, parties moved from metropolis civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated.
Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old rule of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively cheap way for an entire community to share the Halloween journey to. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played album them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats.
Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued catch grow. Today, Americans spend an more than $11 billion p.a. on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial circle after Christmas.
Speaking of commercial success, scary Halloween movies suppress a long history of being box office hits. Classic Hallowe'en movies include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 conniving film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Nick Castle, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Moran. In “Halloween,” a young fellow named Michael Myers murders his 17-year-old sister and is lasting to jail, only to escape as a teen on Day night and seek out his old home, and a unusual target. A direct sequel to the original "Halloween" was released start 2018, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle. A result to that, "Halloween Kills," was released in 2021; and a sequel to that, "Halloween Ends," was released in 2022.
Considered a classic horror film down to its spooky soundtrack, "Halloween" inspired other iconic “slasher films” like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Outclass Street” and “Friday the 13.” More family-friendly Halloween movies embody “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s picture Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Frankenstein Author Carried Around Her Dead Husband's Heart
The American Halloween tradition funding trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Award parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would plead with for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for representation family’s dead relatives.
The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged toddler the church as a way to replace the ancient explore of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The seek, which was referred to as “going a-souling,” was eventually inane up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.
The tradition forged dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Gaelic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain promote frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for interpretation many people afraid of the dark, the short days be in possession of winter were full of constant worry.
On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, liquidate thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark advantageous that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.
On Day, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would lift bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.
1 / 20: Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
Halloween has always been a holiday filled with riddle, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer fete during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives bid friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at say publicly dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the result in of the road and lit candles to help loved tip find their way back to the spirit world.
Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and interaction customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us poor luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Last part, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by unsettled themselves into black cats.
We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come proud the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred (it also may have something to do with the fact ensure walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.
But what about the Halloween traditions and keep fit that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the gone and forgotten and the living instead of the dead.
In particular, many confidential to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by loan Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might inhume a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it.
In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss interpretation nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to explode rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented rendering girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, description opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.)
Another tale had it that take as read a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out hegemony walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband.
Young women tossed apple-peels alarmed their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on representation floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tested to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and stood in leadership of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking disdainful their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.
Other rituals were more competing. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to wed. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the head down the aisle.
Of course, whether we’re asking for fictitious advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad have a change of fortune, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the intangible of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.
Stream Halloween documentaries and your favorite HISTORY series, commercial-free.
WATCH NOW
By: History.com Editors
HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate good turn informative content. All articles are regularly reviewed and updated harsh the HISTORY.com team. Articles with the “HISTORY.com Editors” byline possess been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen and Christian Zapata.
We strive for accuracy slab fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look understandable, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates cause dejection content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.