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DUBROOM
ARTICLE SECTION |
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| History
of Halloween dates back to Ireland 2,000
years ago |
By
Francesca Chilargi
Staff Writer
Each year, millions of children and adults
happily play dress-up and go
trick-or-treating for candy on Halloween.
Halloween is the second most celebrated
holiday, Christmas being the most
celebrated, which rakes in $6 billion
annually. But where did this
annual celebration originate? Is it a
celebration of devil worship?
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One student from India said Halloween doesn’t
exist in his country, but he thinks Americans
celebrate Halloween as part of a new start.
“It’s [Halloween] getting rid of your bad
elements and starting a new cycle,” said
Sudarsan Desikan, 27, a manufacturing engineering
major.
However, in India, they have their own festivals
to acknowledge farmers who work year-round and
each festival has its history and story, according
to Desikan.
Vejaiy Subramanian, 23, also from India, who’s
working on his master’s degree in mechanical
engineering, said he’s not sure why Americans
celebrate Halloween. Subramanian and friends
however, gather together each year to have fun and
celebrate Halloween.
The word “Halloween” comes from the Catholic
Church and it’s a contraction of “All Hallows
Eve” or “All Saints Day,” a Catholic
observance day to honor the saints created in the
800s by Pope Boniface IV.
In Celtic Ireland during the fifth century B.C.,
the Celts summer ended on Oct. 31 and a holiday
called Samhin, meaning the Celtic New Year, began,
according to www.Wilstar.com,
a Web site devoted to the customs of holidays.
The story says the dead spirits of those who died
a year before would come back looking for bodies
to possess for the following year — their only
hope for afterlife.
The Celts practiced a pagan religion known as
Druidism, according to Wonderful World Tomorrow, a
Christian organization.
The Celtic priests and wizards called the Druids,
were well-educated in astrology and magic. During
Samhin, the Druids built large bonfires and often
human sacrifices were executed, a practice to
honor the Druid gods, according to WWT.
The Celts “believed all laws of space and time
were suspended during this time, allowing the
spirit world to intermingle with the living.”
In order to protect themselves, the villagers
would put out the fires in their homes to make
them cold and undesirable. Then, they would dress
up in ghosts’ customs and loudly walk around the
town behaving in a destructive manner to frighten
the spirits.
Some people would leave bowls of food outside
their homes hoping the ghosts would be content
with that and wouldn’t come in, according to
WWT.
According to Wilstar.com, the Celts would burn
someone at the stake who was believed to be
possessed by a spirit to make an example of the
person for the spirits.
However, in the first century A.D., the Romans
copied the Celtic rituals as their own and
included some of their own celebrations as a part
of the Samhin holiday, which still occurred in
October.
During the month of October, the Romans honored
Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, on a
certain day. Pomona’s symbol was the apple,
which might be the reason for the modern day
tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween,
according to Wilstar.com.
Over time, the practices changed and the belief of
spirit body possession faded — while dressing up
like ghosts became more a traditional role.
During colonial times, the people participated in
ghost-telling and pranks such as tipping over
outhouses and unhinging fence gates.
In the 1840s, Irish immigrants introduced
Halloween to Americans. Americans would dress up
in costumes and walk from door to door asking for
food or money, according to WWT. Over time,
children began the practice of asking for food or
money from door to door on Halloween.
The trick-or-treating custom originated in the
ninth century from a European custom called
souling, according to Wilstar.com. On Nov. 2, the
day of “All Souls Day,” Christians would walk
to different villages asking for “soul cakes,”
a square piece of bread with currants.
The more “soul cakes” beggars would receive,
the more prayers they could say for the givers’
deceased loved ones. The souls of the dead would
remain in an indeterminate state and prayers, even
by strangers, would rush the souls to heaven.
Another custom associated with Halloween is the
pumpkin or carving out faces to create the
jack-o-lantern placed outside houses. The
jack-o-lantern comes from an Irish folktale of a
man named Jack who was drunk. Jack tricked Satan
into climbing a tree and carved an image of a
cross in the tree cornering the devil.
After Jack died, he couldn’t enter Heaven
because of his wicked ways, and he couldn’t go
into Hell either since he tricked the devil. So
the devil gave Jack an ember to light his way
through the darkness, according to Wilstar.com.
The ember was inside an empty turnip to keep it
gleaming longer.
The Irish used turnips as their jack-o-lanterns,
but when they came to America they found more
pumpkins available than turnips, which
created the lighted hollow jack-o-lantern pumpkins
used today.
Some people believe the Halloween custom
originated from pagan rituals or devil worships.
In fact, the holiday developed from the Celts
celebrating their new year and from Europeans’
prayer rituals from medieval times.
ORIGINAL
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