October 27, 2007

What time of the year is it when it is considered sane to dress up as witches, wizards and ghosts and go door to door asking for candies? What day of the month of October can it be when young and old alike, deck their houses in eerie ornaments and spooky gadgets and enjoy scaring people out of their wits? It certainly has to be the eve of October 31 and the festival of Halloween!

In several parts of the western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom, Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31.

The term Halloween springs from ‘All-hallow-even’, as it is the evening before “All Hallows’ Day”, or “All Saints’ Day” which is November 1. However, the modern holiday of Halloween has its origins in the ancient Gaelic festival known as Samhain. The Festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is regarded as ‘The Celtic New Year’. Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores.

According to one Celtic legend, November 1 was the day the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife. The Celts believed all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.

Naturally, the still-living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes, to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighbourhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess. The festivals would include raging bonfires, where the bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown.

When the Romans occupied Celtic territory, several Roman traditions also found their way into the festivals. Feralia, a day celebrated in late October by the Romans for the passing of the dead as well as a festival which celebrated the Roman Goddess Pomona, the goddess of fruit were incorporated into the celebrations.

Thus, many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the times of the year when spirits can make contact with the physical world, and when magic is most potent.

The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840s by Irish immigrants fleeing their country’s potato famine. Today it has become the sixth most profitable holiday in USA (after Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentines Day, Easter, and Father’s Day). It is this time of the year when shops are resplendent with Halloween yard decorations like jack-o’-lanterns, scarecrows, witches, orange and purple string lights, inflatable decorations (such as spiders, pumpkins, mummies and vampires).

Pumpkins

The carved pumpkin, lit by a candle inside, is one of Halloween’s most prominent symbols. This is an Irish tradition of carving a lantern which goes back centuries. These lanterns are usually carved from a turnip or Swede. The carving of pumpkins was first associated with Halloween in North America, where the pumpkin was available, and much larger and easier to carve. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their home’s doorstep after dark.

Jack-o-lanterns

The origin of the jack-o-lantern has an interesting story behind it. Irish folklore has it that a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

The Irish used turnips as their “Jack’s lanterns” originally. But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips. So the Jack-O-Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember. Today it is a popular symbol of Halloween.

Trick or treat?

It is a much anticipated time of the year for children as they don costumes ranging from ghostly, eerie creatures to even Spiderman and rabbits and knock on doors yelling ‘trick or treat’.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes”, made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.Upon receiving trick-or-treaters, the house occupants (who might also be in costume) often hand out treats ranging from small candies, chocolate bars, to stickers, or even crayons and pencils Some families go out of their way to use sound effects and fog machines to help establish an scary ambiance in and around their homes and others may just resort to decorating their houses with caved pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns.

Thus one will find the western world in a flurry of orange and black which are the traditional colours of Halloween. In modern Halloween images and products, purple, green and red are also prominent. The use of these colours is largely a result of holiday advertising dating back over a century, and tends to be associated with various aspects of Halloween tradition.

There are many who condemn Halloween and deem it as devil worship, yet if we go down the corridors of history we realise that the day itself did not grow out of evil practices. It grew out of the rituals of Celts celebrating a new year, and out of mediaeval prayer rituals of Europeans. And today, even many churches have Halloween parties or pumpkin carving events for kids.

Even though it has no association with our culture in this part of the world yet in today’s day and age when the media has made this globe into a melting pot of cultures and urges us to revel and accept the cultures and traditions of others there can be no harm in enjoying the eve of October 31 in harmless fun.