Facts About Halloween
by Cheryl Pierce
Have you ever inquired why on earth we celebrate Halloween
and where the idea came from? If you are like most of us,
you simply enjoy the fun and games, and of course treats,
and haven't really given the roots of the holiday much
thought. But the history of Halloween is a very cool story
in its own right.
Very Far back in the day, about 2000 or so years ago, there
lived a people known as Celts. They inhabited the area we
call Ireland, and there were also some in France and the UK,
too. In fact, the oral communication that is spoken in
Ireland is not Irish, as you may think. It is Celtic.
In Any Case, the Celtic people had a different New Year's
Day than we do here today. Their new year began on November
1st; this is probably because November marked the end of the
bountiful, glorious, harvest season and the start of the
cold, dark winter. Hence, it seems like a perfect time for
branding a new year, right?
So, the Celtic people had a hypothesis that their New Year's
Eve, October 31, was the night when there was the perfect
opportunity for the haunts of dead people to return to
earth, and so the worlds of the living and the dead combined
for a night. On this night, the Celtic people turned to
their Druid priests for insight into what was to come in the
New Year. And some hypotheses of the history of Halloween
include the priests' power to know the future by determining
it from the dead who came back to earth.
So, the early interpretation of Halloween, called SamHain
("sow-in"), was born. The Celts usually built these vast
bonfires and dressed up in the skins of animals. They
accumulated around the bonfires in these "costumes" and
sacrificed a small amount of their crops and animals to the
Celtic gods in the hopes that the gods would be good to them
in the approaching year.
Subsequently, the Romans invaded Ireland and the other
Celtic regions, and they contributed their own twist into
what we now recognize as Halloween; subsequently the history
of Halloween was changed a bit. They bestowed a couple
things into SamHain. First, they added a day called
Faralia, which was a day the Romans had put apart as a day
to remember and honor those who had died before us. Then,
they also admitted a day to please Pomona, a goddess whose
symbol is the apple. Remember those days of bobbing for
apples as a kid? You can give thanks to Pomona for that
tradition.
Then, Christianity came to the area, around the 800s. The
Pope at the time, Pope Bonaface, declared November 1st All
Saint's Day, which is still renowned as a Holy Day by the
Catholic Church. The Church often times attempted to
replace pagan holidays with related holidays in order to
placate the pagan people who wanted festivals, but also to
make Christian-based celebrations. The night before All
Saint's Day, SamHain to the Celts, began to be called All
Hallow's Eve or All Hallow's Mass. In The End, it became
recognized as Halloween.
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