Halloween

Halloween. While everyone has their own opinion on the “spooky” holiday, there are some things that the average Joe Schmo across the street may not know about it.

Halloween has Celtic roots to it. It was originally practiced on November first and was called Samhain. However, you’ll find some people who claim that it was originally on the thirty-first.

The Catholics were the envious type. They didn’t want people practicing pagan holidays. So, what they would do is put “Godly” holidays on, or near pagan holidays. For example, they made event for Jesus’ birthday on December twenty-fifth to make it close to the winter solstice, which was on the twenty-first. There were other pagan holidays around this time too.

The Catholics hoped that doing this that people would practice Christmas rather than the winter solstice. In fact, assuming Jesus existed, he was probably born in the springtime rather than the winter.

They did the same thing with Samhain. They made November first All Hallows Day. Which in normal terms is called All Saints Day, being the saints and hallows were synonyms…

People would still practice Samhain in some sense. Since the Catholics made November first All Hallows Day, they would practice All Hallows Eve the day before. October thirty-first. Which to the Celtics was considered the last day of summer anyway. Eventually, All Hallows Eve would turn into just Halloween.

The idea of dressing up on Halloween came from the idea of wearing masks to scare off ghosts.

I’ve hear of two ideas where the “trick or treating” portion came into affect. The first is that the Celts would put out food of their dead buddies so they wouldn’t harm them. Then there’s idea that Christians used to practice a thing called souling. Souling was when kids would go door to door asking for souls cakes, which were basically bread deserts. For every soul cake that the kid got, he had to pray for the dead relatives of the person who gave him the cake.