While we have been so unswervingly focused on politics, which is certainly appropriate right now, the young and the more light-hearted among us are also celebrating one of America's favorite holidays: Halloween. It's a fun holiday that brings out the kid in all of us, with tricks, treats, costumes, and for the adults among us, perhaps a snort of a little something to keep one warm on a cold October night.
It's also, this year, the night we engage in that annoying "fall back" into Standard time, but that's a complaint I'll save for another time. But what about the origins of Halloween? Where did this holiday and its traditions originate?
Well, many cultures, going back as long as there have been, well, cultures, have had harvest festivals, equinox festivals, and so on; it's a time of year for largely agrarian societies to mark the time when the summer's chores are done, and to celebrate having food put away for winter. The Norse had Haustblót, the festival of Winter Finding; the Poles had a harvest festival called Dożynki, and there are many more. But our current celebration of Halloween is based largely on two things; The Christian observations of All Saints' Day and All Souls Day, and the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.
All Saint's Day is primarily a religious, Christian observance.
All Saints’ Day commemorates all the saints of the Christian church, both known and unknown, who are believed to have been received directly into heaven after their death. There are various accounts of its origins. In the 7th century ce Pope Boniface IV established All Saints’ Day, originally on May 13. In the 8th century Pope Gregory III moved the annual feast to November 1, perhaps in part to supplant pagan holidays with a Christian observance. The day after All Saints’, November 2, was later designated as All Souls’ Day, devoted to praying for the souls of all the faithful departed.
But there is one aspect that may look familiar to American Halloween traditions:
In some areas people lit candles or lanterns on graves or in windows on All Hallows’ Eve to guide souls. The very act of remembering the dead with prayers and light helped shape Halloween’s focus on ghosts and spirits. In most Catholic-majority countries, All Saints’ and All Souls’ remain important religious holidays.
Indeed, this may well be the origins of the famous jack-o-lanterns across most of the country. Here in Alaska, we don't generally put out jack — o-lanterns, though. Why not, you ask? Because moose eat them.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has received several reports of moose getting into pumpkins and engaging with Halloween decorations.
Each year, the department says that it sees a spike in moose issues from mid-September through the Halloween holiday.
“We’ve had several reports of moose getting into the pumpkins, hanging out in front yards,” Cory Stantorf with the department said.
“The other side of it is we’ve had several encounters where moose have been tangled up in Halloween decorations, as well as zip lines, garden hoses.”
But it is Samhain that gives us a lot of what we think of as traditional Halloween observances today. The Celts thought that the end of what we call October, the time when the last of the harvest was stored away, as the time when the veil between our world and the next grew thin, a time when the passed could reach back, however tenuously, into our world — and possibly vice versa. This could well be the origin of the spooks, ghosts and goblins angle in our observations now.
Samhain wasn't just a night for spooks, though, not even to the Celts. People celebrating Samhain lit bonfires to honor their ancestors — and to provide a convivial, not to mention warm, place for the community to gather and celebrate. They made and wore costumes, to disguise themselves from those same wandering spirits, with that likely being the origins of our current costuming fun today. They left offerings, on doorsteps, on altars, and on graves, offerings of food and drink, to appease these spirits. And there you have a likely origin for our kids' favorite Halloween tradition: Trick or treat.
They the Celts? Because, while the Celtic peoples (And, mind you, that's pronounced "Keltic," not "Seltic," no matter what some numbskulls named their sportsball teams) lived from the British Isles to the Carpathians, it is from the lands that are now England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland that they remained the longest, and their influence in language and culture crossed the Atlantic with their descendants, leaving influences from holidays to shamrocks. They were a people with a wide variety of subgroups and traditions, some of which weren't very likable — some groups were even known for human sacrifice — but fortunately, it was the more interesting and fun parts of their traditions that they passed on to us.
So, enjoy this day, and the evening to come. Happy Halloween — and trick or treat!
