The Origin of Halloween Traditions

Halloween is an almost picturesque holiday with so many traditions that we all happily take part in without even knowing where or how they started. We know that it’s a time where several cultures celebrate death, and their loved ones, but you’d be surprised to learn how many of these fun parts of Halloween came to be:

• Jack-o-lanterns: going to pick out your pumpkins for cooking and carving is practically a fall ritual, along with apple picking. However, this tradition started in Ireland with turnips and the story of Stingy Jack who was a sneaky man that would trap the Devil until he would promise to never send Jack to hell. However when Jack died, Heaven didn’t want him either, so he was forced to wander lost on Earth. Ironically, the Devil considered Jack a friend, so he gifted him with a carved turnip that had burning coal inside so that he could light his way around Earth. Based on this story, people in Ireland began to carve turnips with scary faces to scare away any evil spirits.
• Trick-or-treating: this tradition is a part of several different cultures combined together, most distinctively Celtic and Scottish. The Celts would leave food on Hallows Eve for the wandering spirits that came to Earth on this night to feast on. It was their attempt to please the spirits in exchange of good fortune. The Scottish, on the other hand, would have poor people or children knocking door to door, asking for food in exchange for prayers. Over time these prayers became songs, jokes or as you can also refer to them, tricks. As these traditions came to the ‘new world’ they began to fuse together and become commercialized until they became the traditions we now know and love.
• Ghosts: the notions of ghosts among the living also comes from Celtic tradition. Several centuries ago, new years would be on the first if November, at the end of the harvest. The new year would signal the end of summer, which meant life, and the start of winter, that came with death and darkness. The Celts believed that the night between the two years, the barrier between the living and dead blurred and ghosts would walk among the living.

Perhaps learning about where these traditions came from will make you appreciate Halloween even more. If you love Halloween because you are fascinated by the morbid, the dead and all things spooky, why don’t you pop over to our online library www.ribemedia.com and check out our selection of horror books?