Halloween
The first Halloweens were tied to the quickening dark, to seasonal change, to death, to the movement of beings—fairies, witches, dead souls—through the night. Halloween was once imagined as a rift in reality where time slipped by without the traveler knowing he’d gone missing. As a night to return home, dead or alive. There was fear, yes, but it was fear of loss—of children and family, of land, crops, and place. This night wasn’t about violence, but rather about the unquiet of guilt, anticipation of the unknown, of facing the consequences of meddling with things you couldn’t—or shouldn’t—control. These Halloweens meant something; they held a place in the year for magic, for mourning, for first love, for fear. Then, and even now on Halloween, the otherworld seems always and uniquely present. On this night, it can be broached, or we, if we’re willing, can imagine it.
Samhain
Halloween likely developed from Samhain (pronounced sow-en, with “sow” rhyming with “cow”), or “summer’s end,” a feast known to Celtic and Scandinavian peoples across Europe over 2000 years ago. Samhain was celebrated around November 1st, when dark came early and the air grew cold. Herds were brought in from summer pastures, and communities reunited to prepare for winter. They likely made laws, told stories, and celebrated with bonfires and feasting; animals were sacrificed.
We first hear of Samhain in Irish sagas recorded by monks between the 9th and 12th centuries. It was a magical time for the mythical peoples of ancient Ireland. Tribes gathered at the central seats of Ireland: at Tara, warriors convened to fend off annual attacks from the Otherworld. Legendary kings were slain at Samhain, monstrous birds released, sacrifices made, great loves consummated. Early historical references (as opposed to mythological) report the slaying of livestock and an opening-of-winter feast. No Samhain rituals are recorded in either myth or history, but we do know that Halloween’s association with ghosts, food and fortune telling likely began with the marking of summer’s end.
All Saint’s and All Soul’s Days
In the feste of al halowen, euery saynt..taketh his owne place.
--from church writings, 1413
When the Roman conquest of Great Britain, begun in 43 A.D., absorbed most Celtic lands, Christianity became the official religion. It’s ironic, given today’s relationship between some churches and Halloween, that early Christians were largely responsible for the survival of this holiday into modern times. A series of papal edicts set a church feast day, All Saint’s, on November 1 in the 9th century. All Saint’s was known as All Hallow’s in Britain (Hallow meaning holy or one who is holy). The evening before, called Hallowe’en, (shortened from Hallows’ eve) was first used in print by Scots poets in the 18th century.
But our modern Halloween’s soul mate is not really All Saint’s Day but All Soul’s Day. Established around 1000 AD in the Cluniac order, and then extended to Christendom, was set on November 2 as a time to pray for friends and family who had recently died. The date was eventually chosen as the day after All Saint’s Day to emphasize the idea that saints could intercede on behalf of the dead. Praying for the dead, and remembering the dead with food (e.g., the mass) are 1000-year-old precedent for both the ghostliness associated with Halloween and what we know now as trick or treating. Throughout the Middle Ages church bells were rung at this time to remember the dead. Some put out food for their loved ones, and some left a lantern burning in their windows so that spirits could find their way home for a visit. Halloween charity was born here as well—the Cluniac monks began serving poor people food on All Soul’s (the poor were medieval stand-ins for the dead), establishing a precedent: for giving directly to the poor, rather than giving to priests on behalf of the poor.
Death and Plenty
It’s possible the church created All Saint’s and All Soul’s Days to take the place of pagan Samhain. In the late 19th century Sir James George Frazer proposed his theory that folkways were vestiges of pagan practices, and wrote that Halloween originated from a pagan festival of the dead. (He also admitted there was no historical record linking Samhain with the dead.) Frazer argued that the church placed its All Saint’s and All Soul’s days on November 1 and 2 to supplant early pagan rites. John Rhys, following Frazer’s lead, claimed Halloween was the Celtic New Year; this he inferred from contemporary folklore he found in Wales and Ireland. And although it’s possible that Halloween contains traces of an earlier, pagan belief system, contemporary British historian Ronald Hutton posits it’s just as likely that what 19th century historians recorded as the remnants of ancient pagan beliefs were half-remembered Catholic teaching. Either way, medieval All Hallow’s was considered an otherworldly time. In Naples, charnel houses were opened and cadavers dressed in robes and displayed. In Brittany, clergy led processions to the graveyard where people poured milk on graves. In Salerno, Italy, families left out food for dead. In Britain, they built bonfires to ward off spirits. In some towns in Elizabethan England people carved turnips—representing the souls of the dead—at All Hallow’s.
But this was also a time of plenty. Medieval All Hallow’s marked the end of the farmer’s year. Larders were full, flocks sheltered, and for the foreseeable future there was time enough for pleasure and, importantly, food enough to share. Throughout the winter holidays, masking, tricks, performances, and processions were enacted in exchange for treats or money. All Hallow’s kicked off the season.
Up to the 13th century, All Hallow’s begging was dependent on the largess of kings and aristocrats. Manor lords and royalty were expected to entertain on All Hallow’s and records indicate that musicians were paid to entertain. Guilds and parishes eventually took over this role, and by the mid-15th century, churches employed seasonal customs like All Hallow’s begging to raise money. In Shakespeare’s England, people went “souling,” or begging small breads called “soul cakes” in exchange for prayers they’d say for the donor’s loved ones and teams of performers also took to the street offering secular plays and music in exchange for food, drink or money. In County Cork, Ireland, adults begged house-to-house for a Halloween feast following a white mare-a man covered with a white sheet holding a wooden horse’s head. In parts of Scotland, costumed beggars out on Halloween were known as “skeklers.” In Wales, boys dressed as girls and girls as boys to go house-to-house singing Halloween rhymes.
Into the New World
In the 18th and 19th centuries, economic conditions in Europe and the British Isles sent many people looking for a better life in America. Scottish and Irish immigrants entered the United States by the thousands and shared their Halloween folklore with new neighbors. Other groups added their own cultural influences. The Germans, for example, brought an especially vivid witchcraft lore; Haitian and African blacks brought their own superstitions about black cats, fire and witchcraft; and the English and Dutch brought a love for masquerade. Late at night in the kitchens of the American South, Irish girls likely whispered with slaves brought from Africa and the Islands: would a black cat’s bone make you invisible? Could you hear the bone scream as you passed it through your lips? Was it true that on All Hallow’s Eve, if you placed an egg front of the fire and it sweated blood, you’d get the man you loved? In the mountains of Virginia, folks said that on Halloween you could hear the future whispered in the wind; and in Louisiana, some said that if you made a “dumb supper”—a meal cooked backwards and in total silence—and waited until midnight, a ghost would slip in and sit at the table.
Halloween celebrations depended entirely on the religious and folk fabric of each region. The Caledonian Society in Canada, founded in 1855, kept the Scottishness of Halloween up front, and people gathered to read Scots poet Robert Burns’ poem “Halloween” (1786) each October. In the Ozarks, Halloween could mean a barn dance; in New York City, parades and firecrackers; in Philadelphia, tavern-hosted masquerades. If there was a commonality, it was this: Halloween-being the night the spirits were out-was a time for anarchy. Young people removed gates, hoisted rocking chairs into the trees and cows onto roofs, and come the next morning, people smiled to themselves and went about their business.
Victorian Holiday
By the end of the 19th century, the world had turned on its head. Darwin had published The Origin of the Species (1859), Freud had begun peeling back the brain to reveal an unconscious, and archeology, spurred by excavations in Egypt and Greece, excited the public imagination. Victorians began to see history as a series of layers, and set about finding old stories, ballads and poems as if they were fossils that could tell what life was really like in the past.
Surrounded by factories and machinery, the world’s first industrial societies came to hunger for the country, for a simpler time they saw as more connected to nature and a deeper truth. There was comfort in ancient traditions, in things that did not change. Halloween, as discovered by Victorian “antiquarians”—rural, colorful, otherworldly, and demanding a certain amount of innocence—was entrancing.
The explosion of mid-to-late Victorian popular literature cast Halloween in a romantic light. Halloween games had been geared towards finding out who would marry who since at least the 1700s, perhaps long before. American magazine fiction published after the Civil War used these fortune telling customs to stir their characters together. Halloween was the backdrop for passion unleashed in the dark, for a titillating brush of hands, cheeks, lips. Heroines, anxious to try the “ancient” divinations of the night, ate apples at midnight in front of a mirror, desperately searching for the face of a future husband. In “The Hallowe’en Sensation at Guv’ner Deering’s,” our heroine descends a dark, foreboding staircase to try the apple magic. She vanishes. A hero—handsome, brave, impetuous—trails her into the dark and finds her frail form, crumpled in the dust. Her eyes flutter open. Love ensues; Halloween triumphs.
In the late 19th-century—an age of reading dominated by the periodical press—how Halloween was described in literature became as important as how it was actually practiced. Where some people certainly celebrated the holiday, a much larger number read Halloween stories and poems, and studied illustrations printed in magazines and newspapers. Halloween fell into the public domain. Halloween celebrations of this era took their cues from Scottish poetry, sentimental fiction and from the writings of folklorists eager to record rural folkways before they vanished. Parlor games emerged from customs that hadn’t been used for centuries, such as jumping over a candle flame. Welsh men had once jumped the Samhain fires, and boys in England had long ago leapt over bonfires at Midsummer’s Eve. Now 19th century Americans, with full dress trains and tight, hitched-up pants, were jumping over candle flames to determine their luck.
A 20th-Century Holiday
The gilded age of American Halloween crested in the early decades of the 20th century. Vanderbilts and Rockefellers closed their summer homes and headed back to the city, and Halloween parties were the signal society events of the winter season. Debutantes danced waltzes at Halloween balls at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to a backdrop of jack o lanterns and yellow chrysanthemums. J.D. Rockefeller ducked for apples at a Halloween party in Tarrytown, NY in 1914, and the major newspapers advertised Halloween-themed getaways at ritzy resorts.
As the century wore on, lavish balls gave way to parades and parties sponsored by civic groups, and Halloween celebrations took over whole towns. There were wild, all-night carnivals on the piers of Venice Beach, CA and ragamuffin parades made up of thousands of costumed marchers traipsing through the Bronx, NY.
An entire industry was set in motion: the first candy containers were manufactured in Germany and imported to America in the early 20th century. Dennison Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts launched its very successful paper costume business in 1910, and its “Halloween Bogie Books,” full of holiday decorating ideas featuring their paper products, at about the same time. Oral tradition fell away; the market for Halloween grew; the celebration crystallized. And although October 31st was still not an official, national holiday in America like Thanksgiving, or a religious one like Easter, no one raised an eyebrow when it turned up on mass market calendars.
Then came the war.
The Halloween "Problem"
There had always been hell-raising on Halloween, but what was once excused as the exuberance of young boys was beginning to look—to the modern eye—like vandalism. Country pranks seemed a nuisance at worst and at best, almost nostalgic. City pranks were seen as malicious and costly. Kids pulled fire alarms, greased the tracks of streetcars that then crashed into each other at intersections, threw bricks through shop windows and smeared brown painted obscenities on their principal’s home. Adults fired buckshot back at kids who were only eleven or twelve years old. Deaths from Halloween mishaps, although not new, were reported with more seriousness, and organizations such as the Boy Scouts, police or city councils set out to change the public face of Halloween.
They provided refreshments and cooked up entertainment, hoping that the lure of free treats might keep kids from mischief on Halloween night. Scarce resources during WWII intensified cries for the end of Halloween pranking; editorial pages coast to coast filled with warnings to young people: “Letting the air out of tires isn’t fun anymore. It’s sabotage. Soaping windows isn’t fun this year. Your government needs soaps and greases for the war…. Even ringing doorbells has lost is appeal because it may mean disturbing the sleep of a tied war worker who needs his rest.” (superintendent of schools, Rochester, NY, 1942) As early as the 1920s, and growing more vociferous by the 1940s, there were continual, organized attempts to calm Halloween celebrations; to move them indoors and away from destructive tricks; to give them over to younger and younger children.
It was only because of UNICEF’s brilliant “Trick or treat for UNICEF” campaign (inaugurated in 1950 and widespread well into the 1960s) that door-to-door Halloween begging became acceptable. Once UNICEF got involved it was almost un-American, certainly uncharitable, to ignore the kids who came ringing your bell. By the end of the 1950s, Trick-or-treating became synonymous with Halloween, and porch lights blazed coast to coast come dusk on October 31st.
Who Put the Hell in Halloween?
It didn't last long. Rumors started fermenting in the 1960s: people were lacing Halloween candy with drugs. October 31 was the high holy day of an ancient Satanic cult. By the 1970s newspapers warned about psychotic strangers burying razor blades in apples and kidnapping kids. John Carpenter’s movie “Halloween” hit the screen in 1978, leading off a cultural re-imagining of Halloween that tied the holiday to violent death and unimaginable evil. The enormous box office success of “Halloween” begat a whole genre of slasher films, many with references to Halloween, the dead returning, Satan, even Samhain. To compound matters, practitioners of modern day witchcraft were becoming more vocal about their own celebration of Halloween and fundamentalist churches even more so in opposition to it. Was Halloween really dangerous?
In a word, no. Halloween poisonings and reports of razor blades incidents were largely proven to be hoaxes, and Hollywood was more responsible than anything for putting the hell in Halloween. Yet the celebration of Halloween changed as if it were all true. Trick or treating became more concentrated in “safe” places—malls, town centers, familiar neighborhoods. Parents began to accompany their kids, fearful for their safety. Look up any October 30th newspaper from the last 40 years and you’ll likely find a list of Halloween dangers to be wary of: fire, traffic, visibility, strangers.
But just when it was looking like Halloween would fall out of favor for all but the very young in their parents’ company, celebrations by adults, often spearheaded by the gay community, came to define Halloween in certain cities in the U.S. In San Francisco’s Castro district, Provincetown, Key West, and Los Angeles, impromptu costumed Halloween gatherings grew larger and larger until the rest of the country joined in. Adults were back in the Halloween party business. Just as it had at the turn of the 19th century, adult Halloween parties were first staged in clubs and private homes, then spilled out into the streets to give us the huge celebrations we see today in towns like Salem, MA or New York City’s Greenwich Village.
By the turn of the 21st century, Halloween had ballooned to the second largest decorating retail holiday, right after Christmas, with more age groups celebrating in more ways than ever before. That’s billions of dollars worth of plastic axes, cornstalks, and black lights; pumpkin puree, liquid latex, rubber rats, fog machines, sugar skulls, foam tombstones and spooky sound CDs. Not to mention vintage collectibles, theme park rides, haunted house admissions and cemetery tours.
Just as a medieval Irish monk might be shocked to see people blithely impersonating the dead on All Hallow’s Eve, Scots farmers in the 18th century would have popped a button to see proper Victorians bobbing for apples in dress coat and tails. So too, Victorians’ jaws would drop if they could see an airbrushed bikini pass muster as a Halloween costume in Key West.
Halloween hasn’t evolved these past 2000 years in a vacuum. It’s always been about who we are and what we as a culture believe is important right now—what we value. In the Middle Ages it was about redistributing the wealth, to the church, it was about redemption. In the early years of the 20th century, Halloween was a big, community-wide celebration; it was about assimilating the thousands of immigrants into American town life. By the 50s it was about all those post war kids: Trick-or- treating became synonymous with Halloween. On Halloween, 2001, six weeks after 9/11, the New York City Village Halloween parade was lead by a giant phoenix: Halloween reflects who we are and what we value.
There’s a lot of hope in Halloween. It celebrates generosity, imagination, community. It’s always described as the one night a year the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead are lifted. Perhaps more specific to us now, Halloween is the one night a year when the barriers between people can be lifted.
