Who Was Halloween Invented by and Where Do Its Traditions Come From?

You celebrate Halloween every year, but do you actually know why? Do you know how Halloween came to be? And where its traditions come from? You’ll learn all that and more in this article.

Who Was Halloween Invented by and Where Do Its Traditions Come From?
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sam_Hain]Sam Hain

Blame Halloween on the Irish. And the Welsh. And the Scots. Even the French, perhaps. Why? Because they’re all Gaels and Halloween’s a Gaelic tradition dating back to pre-Christian times.

There’s no definitive date for its origin, but we do know it’s been around a while.

It’s derived from the ancient Gaelic celebration called Samhain (pronounced “Sah-win”), which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, or the “darker half” of the season.

It takes place from sunset on October 31st to sunset on November 1st. Do any of those dates sound familiar? They should.

Why Do We Dress Up For Halloween?

The main objective of Samhain seems to have been to protect the people and their cattle and help them survive the coming winter.

Part of the Samhain celebration involved dressing up, perhaps to ward off evil spirits or to disguise the participants from these same evil spirits. This was known as “guising”, which is known to have been practiced as far back as the 16th century. It involved the participants stopping at houses in the town or village, where they sang or recited verses in exchange for food.

Does this sound familiar? Take away the singing/recitation and swap candy for food, and, voila – Trick or Treat!

That tradition has been maintained and we see it every year in the Halloween costumes that have become so popular throughout much of the Western world, but particularly in the USA.

So, How Do We End Up With the Name Halloween?

The name we now use for the October 31st celebration of ghouls and ghosts (Halloween, or Hallowe’en) is thought to have been coined around 1745. It has its origins in Christianity and is derived from “hallowed evening” or “holy evening”.

The Scots refer to it as All Hallows’ Eve (the evening before All Hallows’ Day), the word “eve” meaning “even”, which gets contracted to “e’en” or “een”, so that All Hallows Eve eventually became Halloween.

What’s With All the Scary Decorations?

In the U.S., one of the traditional symbols of Halloween is the pumpkin, which is carved into horrific faces and shapes and used as a jack-o’-lantern to decorate the front porches of houses.

But, the Gaelic people of Britain and Europe originally carved out turnips to use as jack-o’-lanterns to ward off evil spirits. Pumpkins are native to the U.S. and are much bigger and softer and therefore much easier to carve than turnips, although, growing up in England myself, I don’t recall having too many problems when we carved out turnips.

The symbols that we now traditionally associate with Halloween have their origins in various sources, including:

Christianity (the backs of churches are often decorated with scenes depicting the Last Judgment showing open graves with the dead rising, heavenly angels and a devil-filled hell; the skull, which references “Golgotha”)
Horror and Gothic literature (novels such as “Dracula” and “Frankenstein”; ghosts are referenced in Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “Halloween”)
Symbols connected to autumn (scarecrows, pumpkins, corn husks, etc.)
Themes associated with evil, mythical monsters and death
Certain colours are also traditionally linked with Halloween, in particular orange and black. But why these two colours in particular? Well, again, it’s thought to go back to Celtic tradition, where orange is thought to reflect the nature of the harvest season, and black is the symbol of death.

Not very uplifting, is it? Maybe not, but it certainly boosts the scariness factor by a frightening amount!

So, armed with all this information, I hope you’ll be able to enjoy your Halloween celebrations even more, knowing just why you’re dressing up, going out trick-or-treating and stopping at houses decorated with orange and black and with skulls, skeletons and pumpkins everywhere.

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Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Who-Was-Halloween-Invented-by-and-Where-Do-Its-Traditions-Come-From?&id=8789945] Who Was Halloween Invented by and Where Do Its Traditions Come From?

 

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