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Halloween HISTORY, TRICK OR TREAT, MOVIES, ANCIENT ORIGINS, ALL SAINTS DAY…READ…LEARN…WIN A FREE BAG

October 31, 2020 by MTR Custom Leather in Social Media with No Comments

Halloween is a holiday celebrated each year on October 31, and Halloween 2020 will occur on Saturday, October 31. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.

Ancient Origins of Halloween

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.

This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

All Saints’ Day

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.

By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.

All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

READ MORE: Who Were the Celts?

Halloween Comes to America

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.

As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing.

Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.

History of Trick-or-Treating

Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes.

Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Halloween Parties

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.

By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated.

Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats.

Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas.

Halloween Movies

Speaking of commercial success, scary Halloween movies have a long history of being box office hits. Classic Halloween movies include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 original film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Nick Castle, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Moran. In “Halloween,” a young boy named Michael Myers murders his 17-year-old sister and is committed to jail, only to escape as a teen on Halloween night and seek out his old home, and a new target.

Considered a classic horror film down to its spooky soundtrack, it inspired 11 other films in the franchise and other “slasher films” like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13.” A direct sequel to the original “Halloween” was released in 2018, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle. More family-friendly Halloween movies include “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

All Souls Day and Soul Cakes

The American Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives.

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. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling,” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry.

On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.

Unpacking this “but for COVID” assertion more closely indicates that these gun control initiatives were not exactly slated for the slam-dunk success that their proponents would have voters believe.

In Florida, an NRA-supported challenge succeeded in getting a misleading gun ban kicked off the ballot. Anti-gun group Ban Assault Weapons Now (BAWN), a project of several gun control groups including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and David Hogg’s March For Our Lives, had attempted to place the gun ban on the ballot in 2020, but failed to obtain the required signatures. Having secured roughly 175,000 signatures, in recent months the group’s goals shifted to placing the measure on the 2022 ballot. With the Florida Supreme Court’s decision, gun control advocates will have to start the ballot measure procedure over from scratch if they intend to continue this attack on Floridians’ Second Amendment rights.

The Oklahoma ballot initiative, State Question No. 809 to rescind the state’s constitutional carry law, was already going nowhere fast. The campaign to undo the 2019 law had bounced from failure to failure before being halted by a court decision on June 23. In that ruling, a nine-judge panel of the Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously concluded that the language of SQ 809 was inaccurate, misleading, and legally insufficient. SQ 809 was declared invalid and ordered removed from the November 3, 2020 ballot.

Rep. Jason Lowe (D-Oklahoma City), a primary sponsor of SQ 809, is quoted as saying that, “if the pandemic hadn’t happened, he’d have amended the language and gotten the measure in front of voters in November.” This is extremely doubtful. Rep. Lowe’s earlier referendum petition on the carry law (State Question No. 803) was dismissed by a court in October 2019 for being far short of the signature threshold needed to get SQ 803 on the ballot. A news article describing the fallout of the June 23 court decision acknowledged that the problem was timing. Lowe’s campaign to repeal the carry law would “not be able to start collecting signatures immediately,” and was “unlikely to have enough time to collect and turn in 178,958 signatures before the secretary of state’s Aug. 24 deadline for petitions to qualify for the November ballot.”

Timing was also the critical issue in Ohio. The push for an initiative petition demanding so-called “universal background checks” began in 2016, although the petition itself was not filed until three years later. The Ohio Attorney General rejected the petition summary because it was not “a fair and truthful statement” of the law being proposed. A new petition was submitted in July 2019, with the goal of collecting enough signatures to get the measure on the 2020 ballot. By pre-COVID December, though, the proponents announced they were pushing the timing back, with a new target ballot date in 2021. None of these delays can be due to pandemic-based stay-home orders.

The Oregon initiatives are not a straightforward case of pandemic postponement, either. In 2018, Initiative Petition 43, to impose a ban on commonly owned semi-automatic firearms and standard capacity magazines, was invalidated by the Oregon Supreme Court in a lawsuit brought by the NRA and other petitioners. Backers of the initiative opted to drop their efforts to get the measure on the 2018 ballot and to focus, instead, on the 2020 election. The sponsors of IP 43 subsequently brought forward three gun control initiative petitions, IP 60, 61, and 62. Although the NRA again challenged the ballot title language, after some changes to the language the Oregon Supreme Court approved the ballot titles in April. A news article states the petitioners had originally planned to “select one petition to gather signatures for after proposal language has been approved,” but no signatures had been submitted for any of these petitions to qualify for the 2020 ballot.

The narrative favored by gun control advocates is that their measures represent the views of the overwhelming majority of voters (assertions that “81 percent of voters in Oklahoma oppose permitless carry,” and “90% of Ohioans support background checks,” for example).

Before COVID provided an excuse for the failure of these measures to get on the ballot, many similar initiatives that were voted on were either rejected outright or passed by much smaller margins than would be expected given the claims of overwhelming support. A 2016 ballot initiative for universal background checks in Nevada was approved by just 50.45% of voters (but once passed, was found to be unenforceable as written). Question 3, a background check initiative in Maine that year, was rejected by voters.

The fact that initiatives on issues other than increased burdens on gun owners will be voted on in Oklahoma, Oregon and across America this November undermines the argument that the pandemic has wiped out gun control initiatives in 2020. A more plausible explanation is that now, with gun sales continuing to break records and an unprecedented number of first-time gun owners, Americans are less interested than ever in ineffectual restrictions on rights and freedoms.

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