Have you ever wondered where Halloween came from?
Here is a short history of what I found out about its origin.
Halloween's origin (also known as All Hallows' Eve) dates back to the Celts, who
lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and
northern France. It was their celebration of their New Year on November 1. This
day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark,
cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts
believed that on the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds
of the living and the dead became very thin and that the ghosts of the dead
returned to earth. To commemorate this event, they built huge sacred bonfires,
where they wore costumes, danced, and attempted to tell fortunes.
Halloween Comes to America
The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in North America until the mass Irish and
Scottish immigration during the early to mid-1800s. It stayed very confined to these immigrant
communities until it gradually spread into mainstream North America by the early
1900s. Originating from
these Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and
go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became
today's "trick-or-treat" tradition.
