Where Did Halloween Come From?

“Where did Halloween come from?” sounds like a question a child might ask, but it’s not a childish question.  Parents may be more comfortable explaining why people dress as scary creatures on a particular day of the year than telling them where babies come from.  Halloween is a tradition which means that people do it because people before them did it.  The first people to celebrate Halloween had to have had a separate reason for doing it.

            Over two thousand years ago, before Christ, people in the British Isles and France called Celts had a holiday called Samhain which means “end of summer.”  It was on the same date that Halloween is on now.  They believed that the spirits of fruits and vegetables as well as people visited our world on that day.  That belief about vegetables may explain why they carved faces into turnips, something people later began doing to pumpkins.

            Centuries later, Christian missionaries reached the Celts.  These missionaries probably found that they had better luck winning converts if they did not ask the people they came in contact to give up all of their pagan customs.  It was common for them to take these pagan elements and give them Christian meaning.  This celebration of spooky spirits of dead creatures became a celebration of Christian saints that had passed on.

            It wasn’t just Halloween.  Winter Solstice celebrations which usually involved wild parties became a celebration of the birth of Jesus.  The worship of bunnies and eggs during the spring equinox became an observance of Christ’s resurrection, but bunnies and eggs are still associated with the holiday, and it retains is original pagan name: Easter.

            These ancient people actually thought they could fool evil spirits into thinking they were also monsters and spirits by wearing costumes.  Guess what!  People still wear costumes on Halloween!  I cannot tell you why people in Ireland went door-to-door begging for food, but that is how trick-or-treating got started. 

            Let’s face it.  Halloween is just too dark for some folks, some even calling it satanic.  Some Christian leaders insist that Christian and pagan practices do not mix.  Even though I cannot imagine childhood without Halloween, participation is not required.  I am not going to stick a gun to a child’s head and scream “carve that pumpkin.”  But when deciding whether to let your kids to go trick-or-treating, please consider the following.  When your little girl dressed as a witch tries to turn her neighbor into a frog because they didn’t give her any candy, she will be thoroughly disappointed.