Mood:

Today, Halloween is known to us primarily as a native f the U.S. party with scary twists. Like almost all holidays and festivals, Halloween also has a much longer history than many would suspect. Although the source is not easy to understand... here it is.
The Christian All Saints/All Souls Day
Halloween is celebrated on October, 31 when kids get theit children halloween costumes and go out. The name is a transformation of the Eve of All Hallows. In Europe, it is the evening before All Saints' Day - the Catholic holiday is on November, 1. Given the linguistic laziness, All Hallows Even was transformed into Hallowe'en or Hallows' Eve. Christian holidays often start the evening before the actual holiday (e.g. Christmas Eve with Christmas). As the name suggests, the Catholic Church commemorates all saints (especially those who were blessed but not recognized). Pope Gregory IV set this holiday on November, 1 around 830 AD. A day later, Al Green took place. The deceased were commemorated on this day. It was long believed that the dead came back from purgatory for a short time on these days to haunt their relatives. This binding to religious holidays of Great Britain only occurs in the traditionally Catholic areas.
The Celtic Samhain Festival
This Halloween celebration, as we know it today, is the result of numerous interplays of history. Traditional customs and religious ideas merged and gave birth to a new festival completely detached from the old customs.
The monthly change from October to November has played an important role in the Northern European culture since ancient times. This is when the summer ended and the winter started. This transition is marked by the Celtic year-end festival Samhain, which is celebrated on November, 1. This celebration resembles Thanksgiving and springs from the rural solar calendar, which identified four major periods of the year. The cattle were removed from the meadows and the last crops were harvested.
The assumption that this was a Celtic festival of the dead is rather controversial for a cultural-historical source of a dead god named Samhain is unknown. With the invasions of the Romans in Northern Europe, these holidays sensed the influence of the Roman mortuary ceremonies. If you believe the legends, the gates of the Elf Hill opened on the Celtic Samhain Day. The living shared the earth with the dead on this day. Other Roman beliefs have developed and continue to shape the image of posterity. Today's idea of afterlife and spirits is finally completed with Christianity.
The difficulty to classify the Samhain Festival lies in the fact that the Celts left almost no cultural records. Most records send us to outsiders, such as the Roman conqueror Caesar. Early records belonging to Christian writers are marked by the Christian faith mission. Scientific neutrality and ethnographic interest are not the main purposes.
But the term "Celts" is quite controversial, too, because this is not a homogeneous ethnic group or a continuous cultural group, but rather a loose ethnic one belonging to the Indo-European language family. Even this is controversial since there are also definitions of the term Celtic which emphasize the physical or archaeological similarities. There are still questions about how the Celtic language arrived in the UK. Maybe it represented an early form of cultural export.
The often-to-read reference to the Celtic New Year Samhain as a direct source of Halloween is rather wishful thinking to a very old myth especially since numerous customs and traditions associated with Halloween in Europe are versions of the Unruh night and other celebrations. People go from door to door and ask for gifts on other days, too.
Halloween was first mentioned in the 7th century. The historian Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Capuchin monk wrote "The Ecclesiastical History of the English People" and claimed that the surplus cattle was slaughtered in November, so November was also called the bloody month. Halloween parties and Halloween bonfires were not mentioned until the 17th century.
Halloween in the modern era
The emigration of Irishmen in 1840 is what made All Hallows' Eve so popular in the United States.Now kids dress in Harry Potter halloween costumes or other interesting characters. The tradition of carving vegetables lamps in the New World came from the Emerald Isle. The American pumpkin was appreciated much more than the domestic beet crop. Soon, the different religious and folk traditions of the Thanksgiving feast were mixed together in the big American pot.
Many of the rituals have lost their original historical meaning and are celebrated primarily for amusement and entertainment. Thus, Halloween festivities are based on the kind of spine-chilling stories known today. Halloween has been introduced in Europe at about the turn of the century, which is where it actually originates.