By Brittney Gasper
As All Hallow’s Eve, (aka Samhain or Halloween) approaches, many prepare to celebrate. Stores are full of decorations, costumes and candy. Haunted houses are popping up and Kula Country Farms is once again selling pumpkins, inviting young and old to explore their patch and take in the beautiful views. Despite this, few may know the origins of the day and why we still celebrate it in our modern world.
Halloween, as we know it today, is a commercialized mess, promoted by dozens of companies, all set on making a profit while parents deal with fears of poison, razor blades and cavities. This, of course, is what the holiday has turned into over the years. Its origins lay in a darker time and with darker meaning than providing children with enough sugar to keep them awake for a week.
Indeed it was the Celtics celebration of Samhain (pronounced sow-in) where the holiday first began. For the Celtics, their new year was not the end of December, but instead the first day of November. It marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of harsh winters, where death was common. It was believed that on the night before the next year began, the veil separating the living from the dead would fall and that ghosts were able to freely roam the earth. The ghosts would cause havoc and destroy crops, but with the veil down it was also easier for priest, known as druids, to make predictions about the future.
They would dress up in costumes, usually made of animal skins and heads and attempt to tell one another’s fortunes. When the celebrations were over, they would relight their fires to help protect their family and homes during the coming winter.
By the ninth century Christianity had all but spread entirely into Celtic lands. Once there, beliefs began to blend together. All-Saints (aka All-hallows) day was celebrated much like Samhain and was celebrated on the first day of November. Thus turning Samhain into All Hallow’s Eve and then into Halloween.
When the holiday made its way to America, it was celebrated mostly in Maryland and Southern states. New England was too rigid with Protestant beliefs. The American idea of Halloween began to emerge when different European beliefs began to mix with those of Native Americans. The arrival of Irish immigrants arriving in America in the second half of the nineteenth century helped to bring about the popularization of Halloween at a national level.
It was in the late 1800s that Halloween began to evolve into what we see today. Community leaders began to encourage people to make Halloween more of a community event, and to remove the grotesque and scarier parts of Halloween in order to make it more friendly towards children. It is because of these efforts that Halloween lost most of its origins and superstitious beliefs bringing it to where it is today.
