How Did Halloween Start ?

Have you ever wondered why on earth we observe Halloween and where the thought came from?  If you are the same as most of us, you just enjoy the fun and games – and of course treats – and haven’t really given the beginnings of the holiday much thought.  But the history of Halloween is a truly cool story in its own right.

Far back in the day – about two thousand years ago – there lived a people acknowledged as Celts.  They inhabited the region we call Ireland, and there were some in France and the UK, too.  In fact, the speech that is spoken in Ireland is not Irish, as you may think.  It is Celtic.

In Any Case, the Celtic people had a dissimilar New Year’s Day than we do here today.  Their new year started on November 1st; this is plausibly because November marked the end of the plentiful, magnificent, harvest time of year and the start of the cold, dark winter.  Hence, it seems like a perfect time for branding a new year, right?

So, the Celtic people had a theory that their New Year’s Eve – October 31 – was the night when there was the perfect chance for the haunts of dead people to comeback to earth, and so the worlds of the living and the dead combined for a night.  On this night, the Celtic people turned to their Druid priests for insight into what was to come in the New Year. And some hypotheses of the history of Halloween include the priests’ power to recognize the future by discovering it from the dead who rejoined to earth.

So, the early interpretation of Halloween, called SamHain (“sow-in”), was born.  The Celts usually built these huge bonfires and dressed up in the skins of animals.  They collected around the bonfires in these “costumes” and sacrificed some of their crops and animals to the Celtic gods in the hopes that the gods would be just to them in the following year. 

Later on, the Romans overran Ireland and the other Celtic lands, and they contributed their own twist into what we now know as Halloween; subsquently the history of Halloween was changed a bit.  They bestowed a couple things into SamHain.  First, they added a day called Faralia – which was a day the Romans had put apart as a day to commemorate and respect those who had died before us.  Then, they also admitted a day to delight Pomona – a goddess whose symbol is the apple.  Remember those days of bobbing for apples as a kid?  You can give thanks to Pomona for that tradition.

Then, Christianity came to the area – around the 800s.  The Pope at the time – Pope Bonaface – stated November 1st All Saint’s Day, which is still celebrated as a Holy Day by the Catholic Church.  The Church often times sought to substitute pagan holidays with associated holidays in order to pacify the pagan people who wanted festivals, but also to make Christian-based celebrations.  The night before All Saint’s Day, SamHain to the Celts, began to be called All Hallow’s Eve or All Hallow’s Mass.  At Long Last, it became acknowledged as Halloween.

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