The Origin of Halloween

By: I. Papa

​The festivities of Halloween are something we all look forward to every year. The decorated houses, the costumes, the candy. Yet have you thought about how it came to be? After all, it is a holiday that promotes the idea of horror, but we have all gotten so used to it by now that it does not even seem the tiniest bit eerie. 
      Halloween’s roots come from more than 3,500 years ago, when at the end of summer, a Gaelic festival called the “Samhain” would occur, where people would light bonfires and dress up of all sorts of things intending to “ward off” ghosts and celebrate the end of harvest and a new year to come. It was typically celebrated on the 31st of October and the 1st of November, hence the day of Halloween.  It was an unusual event, but it brought many traditions to our current days. 
      Later, fall festivals celebrating the end of harvest started incorporating Halloween themes to their festivities due to the costumes that were worn, including ghosts, goblins, witches, and other popular spooky season tropes. As the years went on, this became an even more frequent happening, and it was all slowly but effectively progressing into what we know today to be our cherished Halloween, in which everyone, from different areas of our world, adores and celebrates by decorating their houses with cobwebs, painting their faces, or trick-or-treating at night, dressed up from princesses to skeletons to clowns!
       Even though Halloween comes from a story of years and years ago, it created a phenomenal world of sinister fantasy and even got the power to entitle the month of October as the “spooky season”. It’s astonishing, right? Who would’ve thought that a simple tradition celebrating the end of harvest would become such a world-famous and loved holiday? I sure wouldn’t. However, now that you do know the well-established story behind Halloween festivities, when October comes, I am certain that celebrating “spooky season” will be even more pleasurable.