Halloween

See article below: The history of Halloween

Abigail's Halloween Party - Includes Halloween history, easy costumes, pumpkin carving, party recipes, and games.

About.com - Halloween - Includes recipes, party snacks, clip art, and drinks.

Absolutely Halloween Insights - Facts, information, fun, games, clipart, and insights into Halloween, includeding pumpkins, bats, ghosts, witches, paranormal, and haunted houses.

Ben and Jerry's Halloween Pages - A screensaver, desktop themes, crafts, games, and clip art.

Better Homes and Gardens: Halloween - Costume and mask ideas, party planning, recipes, decorations, and craft suggestions.

Caryn Haunted Playhouse - Includes online activities, humor, party ideas, and clip art.

Caverns of Blood - Halloween site that offers online games, puzzles, graphics, sounds, and humor.

Christine O'Keeffe's Halloween - Includes fairy and monster identification list, customs, recipes, games, history, and links to other holiday pages.

CyberHaunt - Includes virtual haunted house, virtual pumpkin carving, and a cyber-alien abduction.

Dark Side of the Net: Halloween - Features more than 800 categorized Halloween links.

Deaf Community Halloween - Article and links portray Halloween celebrations among the deaf community. From About.com.

Everything Halloween - Offers links, news, children's pages, and shopping.

Ghosts at Jan's Courtyard - Features spooky music and animations.

Gift Idea Center: Halloween Games & Themes - Halloween games and theme ideas for Halloween parties. Games include Ghost Hunter and The Halloween Survivor Game. Costume ideas and other links.

Global Halloween Alliance - Dedicated to networking Halloweenites-people hopelessly in love with Halloween. Publishes Happy Halloween Magazine (not associated with Halloween Magazine). 

The Graveyard - A Halloween page which features tombstone epitaphs and invites visitors write their own and submit them.

Greg's Halloween Pages - Fun and games for the young and old.

Hallow Freaks - Includes history and overview of Holloween, stories, and forum.

4Halloween - Provides links for scary fun, trick or treat ideas, costumes, decorations, witches, goblins, and ghosts.

Halloween - Crafts, recipes, video lists, history of Halloween, and the story behind Halloween characters.

Halloween at Gcards - Halloween virtual cards, recipes, wallpapers, and screensavers. [May not work with all browsers.]

Halloween Cats - The history of Halloween, superstitions about cats, and pet safety at Halloween.

Halloween Central - Includes costumes, wallpaper, safety, games, activities, history, and pumpkin carving patterns.

The Hallowe'en Corner - Ghost stories, Halloween pictures, games and links.

Halloween Eternal - The web site where every day is Halloween.

Halloween from Amazingmoms.com - Includes crafts, recipes, costumes, games and activities, and party ideas. Also features autumn harvest party ideas with pumpkin crafts.

Halloween Fun Facts and Trivia - Piles of interesting facts and trivia relating to Halloween, from the Archive of Useless Facts and Trivia.

2001 Halloween Guide - Includes essays, biographies, costume suggestions, decorations, movies, and creature guides.

Halloween Hauntings - Includes graphics, games, recipes, vampires, and articles.

Halloween is Here - Includes games, coloring, costume ideas, recipes, and safety tips.

Halloween Magazine - Includes articles, interactive safety quiz, poetry, and links to related sites.

Halloween Music Trivia - Name the Halloween-related songs given only the name of the artist and a small hint.

Halloween on the Net - Features seasonal stories, printable craft pages, animations, and historical information. Includes a celebration of Mexico's "Days of the Dead."

Halloween Online - Includes how-to guides for haunting, decorations, make-up and costumes, and special effects.

Halloween Party - Spooky, and fun, five page Halloween web adventure.

Halloween Spirits - Traditions, customs and history, a monster dictionary, movie guide, stories, crafts, recipes, and online games.

Halloween Trick or Treat - Halloween party ideas, recipes, games, and links. Special areas just for younger surfers and just for grown ups.

Halloween Trivia - Trivia about signs of a werewolf, ancient lore, and Halloween facts.

Halloween Trivia - Facts and trivia about Halloween from BabyCenter.

Halloween Trivia from KinderArt - Halloween trivia about ancient autumnal festivals upon which Halloween is based.

Halloween Trivia Quiz - Test your Halloween IQ.

Halloween Web - Providing Halloween tips, tricks and ideas online for parties, costumes, cooking, costumes, and urban legends.

HalloweenHowl.com - Halloween history, superstitions, games, articles, crafts, and related links.

The Halloween-Master - Offers graphics, links, props, sounds, scary graphics and web tools.

HallowFreaks Halloween Community - Offering holiday tips, games, craft ideas, gifs, and a webring.

Happy Halloween - A collection of Victorian postcards, a brief history, and Halloween clip art.

Happy Halloween from Rumela.com - Provides the history, traditions, and facts for this day. Offers recipes and holiday greetings.

Haunt Night - A haunted place where demons and freaks create music, art and games of horror and Halloween for your entertainment.

The Haunted - Offers a Haunted Mansion, book lists, sounds, graphics, and a crypt.

Haunted Bay - Halloween and harvest season information for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Haunted Corners of the World Wide Web - Features links to Halloween-related sites.

The Haunted House - Spooky music midis, links, games and photographs. [English and German]

Haunted Illinois - Links, prop ideas, a defense of Halloween, and current Illinois haunted house listings.

Haunted.net - Party ideas, tips, games, graphics and links.

Haunters Hangout - Gives prop building ideas, book and video reviews, haunted house listings, haunt surveys, epitaphs, message boards, and links.

HauntWorld.com - Haunted attractions, pumpkin 101, horror cards.

HGTV Halloween Ideas - Crafts, recipes, costumes, and decorating ideas from Home & Garden Television.

Home of the E-Wytch - A spooky fun filled website with Halloween recipes and games, ghost stories.

House on Ghost Hill 2 - An interactive, spooky adventure through a haunted house. Includes music, sounds and sites.

The House That Spooky Built - Graphics, poetry, history of Halloween, movies, horror, a bit of the dark side.

How Stuff Works: Halloween - Informative history and explanation of various Halloween traditions, with many related links.

Huddle Holidays: Halloween - Includes graphics, humor, games, activities, recipes, fonts, counter digits, sounds, crafts, and coloring.

An ITLNet Halloween - Includes recipes, simple projects, stories, midis, and tips.

Jack O'Lantern's Net - Halloween songs, traditions and recipes from around the world.

Jim and Nancy'sHalloween - With a ghost, magic, recipes and Halloween links.

Kelly's Kabbage Patch - Webmistress's thoughts and links for Halloween .

Marvelicious Halloween - The history of halloween, a couple of poems and links.

Millspaugh Mansion - Music, sounds, images, and literature for Halloween, not all of it original.

Philly Burbs Halloween 2002 - The weird, wild, silly, spooky and expensive side of Halloween: movies, costumes, ornaments, ghosts and witches.

Phil's House of Horror - Costume ideas, and the origins of Halloween.

Pumpkin Land - Personal Halloween pages.

Ravencroft Graveyard - Halloween sound files, graphics, games, and software.

Robert Burns' Halloween - A long poem by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns entitled "Halloween" offering glimpses of how the holiday was celebrated in rural Britain.

A Romantic's Guide to Halloween - Romantic party, costume, craft, and movie ideas plus special feature articles, dedications, and clip art.

Sleepless Jim's Halloween Trivia Page - Includes history, facts, timeline, Halloween birthdays, links.

Things That Go Bump in the Night - A Halloween site with an incantation to raise the dead, the top 10 scary movies of all time, and a history of Halloween in Wales.

Things that Go Quizz in the Night - Halloween trivia, or the "Cemetary of Forsaken Trivia."

Webicurean Halloween - Halloween lore and safety tips with links to games, screensavers, recipes, online haunted houses, and other sites. Includes a message board.

Welcome To Hell - Halloween humor, rules to survive a horror movie, party tips, original stories, and animated gifs.

The History of Halloween

Halloween or Hallowe'en is a holiday celebrated in much of the Western world on the night of October 31, the night before All Saints Day (Nov. 1), hence its alternative name as All Saints Eve or All Hallows' Eve. Long surviving in Ireland, it was brought to the United States by Irish emigrants in the 19th century. A variation is "Punkie Night" which is observed the last Thursday in October in the village of Hinton St. George in the county of Somerset in England (see under "Jack o"Lantern' below).

Symbols

Halloween is a holiday that is based around embracing scary things, particularly those involving death, the undead, "evil" magic, and mythical monsters. It is a liminal or threshold occasion, when the distinctions between the daylight world of reason and the spectral nightworld are blurred.

Commonly-associated Halloween "characters" include ghosts, witches, black cats, goblins, banshees, zombies, and demons, as well as certain literary figures such as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.

Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. There are also elements of the autumn season reflected in symbols of Halloween, such as pumpkins and scarecrows.

Jack O'Lantern

The jack o'lantern is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. In Britain and Ireland, a turnip was, and sometimes still is, used but emigrants to America quickly adopted the pumpkin since it is much easier to carve. Families that celebrate Halloween will carve a pumpkin into a scary or comical face, and place a candle inside the hollowed out shell, creating a crude lantern. This is then placed on the home's doorstep on Halloween night in order to scare evil spirits away.

A variant of a Jack o'Lantern carried on a string is a feature of Punkie Night, celebrated the fourth Thursday of October in the village of Hinton St. George, Somerset. (In England, Celtic customs and language have lingered longest in the southwest.) For Punkie Night, children carry lanterns made from hollowed-out mangel-wurzels (these days pumpkins are used) with faces cut out of them around the village boundary, collecting money and singing the punkie song. Punkie is derived from pumpkin or punk, meaning tinder. Though the custom is only attested over the last century, and the mangel wurzel itself was introduced into English agriculture in the later 18th century, "Punkie Night" appears to be much older, older even than the fable that now accounts for it, in which the wives of Hinton St. George went looking for their wayward husbands at the fair held nearby at Chiselborough, the last Thursday in October, but first hollowed out mangel wurzels in order to make lanterns to light their way. The laboriously improvised lanterns are not so easily explained, but the reaction of drunken husbands to the eerie lights is perhaps more telling: they immediately identified the lights as "goolies," the restless spirits of children who had died before they were baptized and fled in terror! Children carry the punkies now. The event has spread since ca 1960 to the neighboring village of Chiselborough.

Sources: on-line report from the Western Gazette and a National Geographic radio segment. Chiselborough Fair is memorialized by Fair Place in the village. The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868) reported that there was "a fair for horses and cattle on the last Thursday in October."

Trick or Treating

The main event of Halloween is trick-or-treating, or guising, in which children dress up in costume disguises, and go door-to-door in their neighbourhood, ringing the bell and yelling "trick or treat!" or "Halloween apples!" The occupant of the house then gives the child some small candies, miniature chocolate bars or other individually wrapped treats. Children can often accumulate quite a lot of treats on Halloween night, filling up entire pillow cases or shopping bags.

Typical Halloween costumes have traditionally been monsters such as vampires, ghosts, witches, and devil.In 19th century Ireland the reason for wearing such fearsome costumes was the belief that since the spirits that were abroad that night were essentially intent on doing harm, the best way to avoid this was to fool the spirits into believing that you were one of them. In recent years however, more contemporary costume ideas have also become popular, such as dressing up as a character from a popular TV show or movie. It's not uncommon for Halloween participants to celebrate by wearing costumes related to a specific theme or time. In 2001, after the September 11 Attacks, for example, costumes of firefighters, police officers, and US military personnel became popular amongst children.

Trick or Treating usually ends when a child enters his or her teenage years. Teenagers and adults instead often celebrate Halloween with costume parties or other social get-togethers.

Halloween Parties

There are several traditional games associated with Halloween parties. The most common is bobbing for apples, in which a tub or a large basin is filled with water in which apples float. The participants must remove an apple from the basin using only their mouths. Naturally everyone gets wet. Another common game involves hanging up treacle or syrup-coated scones by strings. These must be eaten without using hands while they remain attached to the string, an activity which inevitably leads to a very sticky face.

Halloween Divination rituals

A number of the games traditionally played at Halloween are forms of divination. Another game, Púicíní (pronounced "pook-eeny"), a form of "Blindfold", is played in Ireland. A blindfolded person was seated in front of a table on which are placed several saucers. The saucers are shuffled and the seated person then choses one by touch. The contents of the saucer determine the person's life for the following year. A saucer containing earth means someone known to the player will die during the next year. A saucer containing water foretells travel, a coin means new wealth, a bean means poverty, etc. In 19th century Ireland young women placed slugs in saucers sprinkled with flour. The wriggling of the slugs and the patterns subsequently left behind on the saucers were believed to portray the faces of the womens future spouses.

In North America, unmarried women were frequently told that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror --- or a skull if they were destined to die before they married. The custom was widespread enough to be commemorated on greeting cards from the late nineteenth century.

Baking

A Halloween custom which has survived unchanged to this day in Ireland is the baking, or, more often nowadays, the purchase of a barm brack (Ir. "báirín breac"). This is a light fruit cake into which a plain ring is placed before baking. It is said that whoever finds this ring will find his or her true love over the following year.

Cultural history of Halloween

Although modern Halloween is a secular holiday, cultural historians recognize its connections with the pagan Celtic season of Samhain. Like other feasts in the Christian year, the earlier observations were Christianized as the feast of All Saints. Roman Catholics object. They localize the revised autumnal date for All Saints in Germany, and identify the celebration of All Saints with feasts of groups of martyrs, in disant centers such as Antioch.

Celtic observation of Samhain

Its earliest roots are found in the Druidic holiday of death which took place each year the night of October 31 (Celtic days beginning with the eve), in the season of Samhain. After the crops were harvested, Druids in Ireland and Britain would light fires and offer sacrifices of crops and animals. As they danced around the fires, the season of the sun passed and the season of darkness would begin. When the morning of November 1 arrived, the Druids would give an ember from their fires to each family who would then take them home to start new cooking fires. These fires were believed to keep the homes warm and free from evil spirits, as it was considered a time of year when the veils were thin between worlds. A three-day festival called Samhain (pronounced "sow-inn") followed. In Ireland it was believed to be the night on which the invisible "gates" between this world and the Other World were opened and free movement between both worlds was possible. In the Other World lived the immortal "Sidhe" (pronounced "shee"), the female members of whom were called beán sidhe or banshees. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities and hundreds of fires are lit each year in Ireland on Halloween night. Villagers cast the bones of the slaughtered cattle upon the flames. The word "bonfire" is thought to derive from these "bone fires." With the bonfire ablaze, the villagers extinguished all other fires. Each family then solemnly lit their hearth from the common flame, thus bonding the families of the village together.

Like most Celtic festivals, it was celebrated on a number of levels. Materially speaking it was the time for gathering in food for the long winter months ahead, bringing people and their livestock in to their winter quarters. To be alone and missing at this dangerous time was to expose yourself and your spirit to the perils of imminent winter. In present times the importance of this part of the festival has diminished for most people. From the point of view of a tribal people for whom a bad season meant facing a long winter of famine in which many would not survive to the spring, it was paramount.

From an astrological perspective, the rising of Pleiades, the winter stars, heralds the supremacy of night over day, the dark half ruled by the realms of the moon.

In the three days preceding the Samhain month the Sun God, Lugh, maimed at Lughnassadh, dies by the hand of his Tanist (his other self), the Lord of Misrule. Lugh traverses the boundaries of the worlds on the first day of Samhain. His Tanist is a miser and though he shines brightly in the winter skies he gives no warmth and does not temper the breath of the Crone, Cailleach Bheare, the north wind. In this may be discerned the ageless battle between the light and dark and the cyclic nature of life and the seasons.

Christian views

Modern Christian writers have conjured up a Druidical belief that on the eve of this festival a 'Samhain, lord of death" (a modern invention), called together the wicked spirits that within the past 12 months had been condemned to inhabit the bodies of animals (a most un-Celtic transmigration of souls). During the night the great shield of Skathach was lowered, allowing the barriers between the worlds to fade and the forces of evil to invade the realms of order, the material world conjoining with the world of the dead. At this time ghosts, witches, hobgoblins, black cats, fairies and demons of all kinds roamed amongst the living. The dead could return to the places where they had lived and food and entertainment were provided to exorcize them. If food and shelter were not provided, these spirits would cast spells and cause havoc towards those failing to fulfill their requests. It was the time to placate the supernatural powers controlling the processes of nature. In addition, Halloween was thought to be the most favorable time for divinations concerning marriage, luck, health and death. It was supposedly the only day on which Christians imagined that the help of the devil was invoked for such purposes.

Christianizing the Celtic Samhain

When Christianity eventually reached Ireland in 432 (and later the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England), conversion began among the local people, including Christianization of the old Celtic traditions. This included a celebration of All Saints in the 20th of April, according to earliest Irish sources, like the Martyrology of Tallacht and the Felire of Oengus. There was no attempt on the part of missionaries in Ireland to "Christianize" a "Samhain" festival, or at least no direct documentation of any such claims has ever been discovered. Pope Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary, not by chance, for 1 November. In 835, Pope Gregory IV extended the celebration for all the martyrs (later all saints) on November 1 to include all the churches. The Christian establishment successful co-opted the Samhain season by shifting the emphasis. When November 1 became the new date for the feast of All Saints, all the Saints and Martyrs being called upon to sanctify the season, the pagan Celtic Samhain became merely 'Hallows Eve' It turned into a vigil of preparation for the morrow, which was made a day of obligation, when Christians were obliged to attend mass.

Even later, in the 11th century, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor all the dead: all the Christian souls in the half-world of Purgatory. Catholic doctrine most clearly reveals the liminal or threshold connection between the two worlds: "that the souls which, on departing from the body, are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins, or have not fully atoned for past transgressions, are debarred from the Beatific Vision, and that the faithful on earth can help them by prayers, almsdeeds and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass." (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910: 'All Soul's Day').

Pope Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November, in accordance with German practices, not Irish. In 835, Pope Gregory IV extended the celebration for all the martyrs (later all saints) on November 1 to include all the churches.

All Soul's Day was accepted and Christianized by Odilo (died 1048) in the Cluniac monasteries, and its observance spread through the Celtic north before it was introduced into Italy.

Later, in the 19th century, James Frazer and John Rhys claimed that the Christian establishment had successfully "co-opted" (not their word) the Samhain season, although neither of them had any written record available of any such "Samhain" festival, beyond the existence of a month in the old Irish calendar with that name. The truth of the matter is that in the very lands where Samhain might have been celebrated, there was no co-optation until it coincidentally occurred due to a regularization of a feast that had been celebrated at several different dates--including the month of April in Ireland. It should also be noted that Christians often denigrate suggestions of any mythic or pre-Christian content in Christian observances.

Halloween customs pre 1900

Observance of Halloween faded in the South of England from the 17th century onwards, being replaced by the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot on November 5. However it remained popular in Scotland and the North of England. It is only in the last decade that it has become popular in the South of England again, although in an entirely Americanised version. The custom survives most accurately in Ireland, where the last Monday of October is a public holiday. All schools close for the following week for mid-term, commonly called the Halloween Break. As a result Ireland is the only country where children never have school on Halloween and are therefore free to celebrate it in the ancient and time-honoured fashion.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have evolved from the European custom called souling, similar to the wassailing customs associated with Yuletide. On November 2, All Souls Day, Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes" - square pieces of bread with currants. Beggars would promise to say prayers on behalf of dead relatives helping the soul's passage to heaven. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits at the Samhain. See Puck (mythology).

In Celtic parts of western Brittany. Samhain is still heralded by the baking of kornigou. Kornigou are cakes baked in the shape of antlers to commemorate the god of winter shedding his "cuckold" horns as he returns to his kingdom in the Otherworld.

Christianizing the Lemuria

May 13 was the culmination of the Roman Feast of the Lemures, in which the restless wandering spirits of the dead were propitiated with offerings and incantations.. Pope Boniface IV at the Feast of the Lemures, 13 May, either in 609 or 610 (the day being considered more significant than the year), reconsecrated the Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, ordering an anniversary. The feast was to honor all the saints, 'known or unknown' and is taken as the early version of All Saints.

Religious Viewpoints

The mingling of Christian and "pagan" traditions in the early centuries following the founding of the Christian Church have left many modern Christians uncertain of their responsibility towards this holiday. Some fundamentalist Christian groups consider Halloween a Pagan holiday and may refer to it as "The most evil day of the year", refusing to allow their children to participate. Among these groups it is believed to have developed Satanic influences, as have many other Pagan practices. It used to be that on Halloween, schools would give children boxes to collect pennies in for UNICEF, but after these fundamentalist Christians complained that the schools were endorsing a Pagan religion, most schools stopped distributing such boxes. Other Christians, however, continue to connect this holiday with All Saints Day. Some modern Christian churches commonly offer a "fall festival" or harvest-themed alternative to Halloween celebrations. Still other Christians hold the view that the holiday is "safe"; that is, that it is not Satanic in origin or practice and that it holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children. On this day, Neopagans celebrate the sabbat of Samhain. Many Neopagans also take part in secular Halloween activities.

See also:

Halloween:The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallow by Jack Santino

A Selected Bibliography on Halloween and Related Topics, American Folklife Center

Source: information here is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Halloween.