What is Halloween?

Halloween is a secular holiday combining vestiges of traditional harvest festival

celebrations with customs more specific to the occasion such as costume wearing, trick-or-
treating and decorations based on imagery of death and the supernatural. It takes place on
October 31.

It was ,until the last few decades of the 20th century a children's holiday, in more recent
years common Halloween activities such as mask wearing, costume parties, decorations,
and even trick-or-treating have grown quite popular with adults as well, making Halloween
an all-ages celebration.

What does the name 'Halloween' mean?

The name Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Eve, meaning the day before All
Hallows Day (better known as All Saints Day), a Catholic holiday commemorating
Christian saints.

How and when did Halloween originate?

The best available evidence indicates that Halloween originated in the early Middle Ages as
a Catholic vigil observed on the eve of All Saints Day, November 1.

It has become commonplace to trace its roots even further back in time to a pagan festival
of ancient Ireland known as Samhain (pronounced sow'-en or sow'-een), about which little
is actually known. The prehistoric observance marked the end of summer and the onset of
winter, and is said to have been celebrated with feasting, bonfires, sacrificial offerings, and
paying homage to the dead.

Despite some thematic similarities, there's scant evidence of any real continuity of tradition
linking the Medieval observance of Halloween to Samhain, however. Some modern
historians, notably Ronald Hutton (The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in
Britain, 1996) and Steve Roud (The English Year, 2008, and A Dictionary of English
Folklore, 2005), flatly reject the commonly held notion that November 1 was designated
All Saints Day by the Church to "Christianize" the pagan festival. Citing a lack of historical
evidence, Steve Roud dismisses the Samhain theory of origin altogether.

"Certainly the festival of Samhain, meaning Summer's End, was by far the most important
of the four quarter days in the medieval Irish calendar, and there was a sense that this was
the time of year when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest and magical things
could happen," Roud notes, "but however strong the evidence in Ireland, in Wales it was
May 1 and New Year which took precedence, in Scotland there is hardly any mention of it
until much later, and in Anglo-Saxon England even less."