I’ve been
doing some of the more familiar witches fairy tales as a segue between the
fairy tales and Halloween, but now we’re here, the big dog itself. So,
definitively, is Halloween a pagan or a Christian holiday? Yes.
So,
Halloween as we know it today is a curious amalgamation of different traditions
stemming primarily Celtic (mostly Irish) traditions and early Medieval
Christian. Throw in some Puritanism and some good old Yankee know-how, and we
get Halloween. Yes, Halloween, in its modern incarnation, was invented in the
good old US of A. It’s as American as pizza. Yes, strictly speaking there was a
version of pizza made in Italy well before what came about in NYC, but the
basic concept became the real deal on this side of the Atlantic.
The same is
true with Halloween. I’ll start very close to the beginning. The Irish Celts
celebrated (and modern pagans still do) a holiday called Samhain (pronounced
sawhen). It was a harvest festival, and was also believed to be a time of great
spirituality, when the boundary between the world of the living and the dead
was at its thinnest. Spirits could be seen, heard, talked to, play Scrabble,
etc. The Irish believed strongly in the faeries, and believed that they, too,
were more likely to cross over or leave their mounds to cause mischief.
Interestingly,
know, that’s not where trick or treat comes from. We’ll get there.
Enter the
Roman Catholic Church.
I like how
ominous that sounds as its own paragraph. Anyway, the Church, in an effort to
convert the pagans, decided to introduce a new holiday called All Saints Day on
November 1st. Yep, November. Oh, incidentally, this is also known as
All Hallows Day. The practices introduced by the church began to mingle with
those of the Celts to produce some interesting and fun traditions.
The faerie
mischief soon began to be carried out by people. The mischief was largely
innocent, just inconvenient, and never harmful—my favorite is a story about how
an entire family’s furniture was moved on top of the room of the house while
they slept.
They also
practiced what was called guising, dressing up in another guise to mingle among
the faerie kind. This is where we get the tradition of dressing up on
Halloween.
Now, tricks
and treats. Yes, tricks and treats,
not or. This went along with the guising, and these tricks were never
mischievous. It was the price of earning a treat. Guisers would knock on doors
and perform a trick (dancing, juggling, singing, etc.) in order to earn a treat
from the household. Jack O’ Lanterns were also popular back then as a way to
see in the night and ward off evil spirits . . . but most were carved from
turnips. Europe didn’t have pumpkins, and they had lots of turnips. Go figure.
I’ll get to the pumpkins, don’t worry.
Now for
some linguistic math. Night before All Hallows Day = All Hallows Evening.
All Hallows Evening – ing = All Hallows Even. All Hallows
Even – All = Hallows Even. Hallows Even * contraction = Hallows E’en. Hallows +
E’en = Halloween. Isn’t language math fun!
Now,
Europe, for the most part, exported the believers in Halloween with the
Puritans and other colonists to the Americas. Over here is where the practice
of using pumpkins came into its own because they were more plentiful and easier
to carve than turnips. Because most of the Halloween celebrators left Europe,
the traditions fizzled out. It became huge over here. There are accounts of it
being celebrated well before the Revolutionary War.
Then,
something curious happened. The States kept celebrating, all the way up to
WWII. Then, the US sent thousands of troops to Jolly Old England to prepare for
D-Day. And in that time, the American soldiers took their traditions of
Halloween with them, reintroducing it to the British. The holiday has been
growing in popularity in the UK ever since.
So, the
answer is yes and no. This is a unique holiday that wouldn’t exist if not for
the combination of both the Celtic and Catholic traditions before being ported
over to the colonies. Maybe next year I’ll tackle the Mexican tradition of the
Day of the Dead.