The Origins of Halloween: Why We Still Love to Be Scared

Integra Youth
2 days ago
3 min read

History of Halloween: How we Continue to Enjoy being scared.

October feels different. The world becomes slowly orange, the air washes, the falling of leaves becomes more noisy. Between the rows of candy and the grisly ornaments something primeval awakens some time-honored ceremony that never really passed away. Halloween is all around us once again, dressed up as fun, but constructed on the basis of thousands of years of fear, faith and fire.

The light we do now is not bonfires but pumpkins. We mock imaginary ghosts rather than fear real ghosts. But Halloween has never been anything different: it has been an attempt to reconcile with the dark.

When the Church Custodized the Shadows.

The Church did not annihilate Samhain rebranding it centuries later when Christianity was introduced to Europe. Pope Gregory III shifted All Saints Day to November 1 st, and October 31 st was therefore the eve of All Saints: All Hallows' Eve, which was later abbreviated to Halloween.

Rather than burning bonfires, people used candles. They did not call on spirits they prayed over saints. The Church substituted superstition with faith and retained the time and, ironically, the mood. Even on the eve of a holy day, the place was still haunted, and that was the combination of sacred and strange, which made Halloween stand alive.

It turned into a sort of cross prayer, cross performance whereby people could remember the dead, laugh at fear and delineate the end of the seasons to coincide.

The Games of the Living and Trick-or-Treating.

By the Mid Ages the Halloween had taken another turn. It also started to have people souling around, that is, going to houses to pray to their dead in return to eat, particularly small sweet pastry known as soul cakes. Children would soon follow along singing songs, wearing simple costumes and demanding treats.

In they could bring those traditions with them to North America in the 1800s, Irish immigrants clashed with other European traditions of harvest time. The outcome was a novelty: neighbourhood meetings, masquerading processions, and mischievousness.

By the 1930s, the official takeover had been performed by trick-or-treat. People did not get spirits away; instead, they offered them candy. It was a matter still of coping with anarchy-- except that this time it was the anarchy of masked kids.

And yet, that little custom made something brilliant. It turned fear into fun. It recreated publicly the darkness. You might knock on the door of a stranger, be rewarded in faking the pretence of being frightening and walk away laughing.

The Pumpkin That Came to Take the Place of Fire.

Even the pumpkin you have glowing in your porch is ancient. People in Ireland made turnip faces and put candles in them in order to scare away evil. The myth about it spoke of Stingy Jack - a man who fooled the devil and was doomed to walk the earth with a light lantern which burned in a hollow root carved in the shape of a root.

Pumpkins, when the Irish settlers got to America, were larger, brighter and simpler to cut. What proved to be a grim warning was now a warm sign of the celebration. The jack-o'-lantern ceased to be an instrument of terror, and became a lantern of happiness, and illumined doorsteps rather than cemeteries.

Why We Still Celebrate

Then why is Halloween still alive when we are losing so many of our old customs? It tells us of something which we still require.

One night we have a chance to play with terror and not to be devastated by it. Dressing like monsters will help us to be less afraid of the actual ones the failures, the losses, or the anxieties that plague us daily. Halloween allows one to be bizarre, to conceal, to be different, and to laugh at what we do not comprehend.

It is also the holiday, which is not afraid of telling the truth about the life which is light and dark, joy and death, all mixed together. Just like the ancient people used to dance around the fires to feel safe in cold, we now put ghosts on our houses to feel we control what horrifies us. We have merely replaced the torches with the LED candles and sacrifices with candy.

Sources:

Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford University Press, 2002. (Comprehensive history of Samhain, Christian adaptation, and modern Halloween culture.)
History.com Editors. (2023, October 24). History of Halloween. History Channel. https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween (Explains Samhain, All Hallows’ Eve, and the origins of trick-or-treating.)
Thomas, H. (2021, October 26). The origins of Halloween traditions. Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/10/the-origins-of-halloween-traditions/