Halloween History from HuffPo

Read full story at HuffPo

The History Of Halloween Plus 5 Things You Didn't Know About The Holiday!

Huffington Post | Katla McGlynn
First Posted: 10-30-09 11:01 AM | Updated: 10-30-09 11:42 AM

Americans love Halloween. We as a country spend over $5 billion a year celebrating it. But where did the holiday come from? And how did traditions like asking strangers for food and dressing up as ghosts develop?

Halloween has its roots in Samhain (pronounced sow-in), an ancient harvest festival held at the end of the Celtic year. The festival marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark wintertime. It was believed the spirits of the dead returned on this eve to damage crops and play tricks on the living. It was also believed that the Celtic priests, or Druids, were able to make predictions about the future, which they did during large bonfire celebrations where they wore animal skins and sacrificed crops and animals to the spirits.

In early A.D., Romans came to the Celtic territories of modern day England, Scotland and Northern France, and were the first people to influence the celebration of Samhain. They brought their own holidays: Feralia, the Roman day to honor the dead in late October, as well as another holiday to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. It is possible that this Roman influence is the reason apples are given out and bobbed for on Halloween.

By 800 A.D., Christianity spread to the Celtic Territories and brought with it another holiday, "All Saints Day." Pope Boniface IV, the designator of All Saints Day, was likely trying to replace Samhain with a similar but holier holiday meant to honor saints and martyrs. Later on, All Saints Day was renamed "All Hallows" and thus the day of Samhain (Oct. 31st) began to be called "All Hallows Eve," and eventually shortened to "Hallowe'en."

All of the holidays that were melded together to create our modern version of Halloween involved dressing up in one way or another. The celebrators of Samhain wore animal skins at their bonfire celebrations and those that observed "All Saints Day" often dressed as saints or angels. Later on men in Scotland would impersonate the dead on the day, explaining the ghoulish tradition we still observe.

During the mid 1800's, Irish and English immigrants flooded the United States and brought Halloween with them. From these immigrants we received the Halloween traditions we recognize today, however skewed they are now. For instance, the first trick-or-treaters were far from today's smiling children with commercialized costumes. They lived in Medieval England, and practiced "souling," in which poor people would beg for sweet breads, in return for praying for the families' souls. Later, the immigrants who brought Halloween to America would develop their own version of trick-or-treating, but it didn't become popular here until the 1930s.

Read the full story (including the five things) at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/the-history-of-halloween_n_321021.html