A Brief History of Halloween
Jolly Hallowe'en. Art and Picture Collection, NYPL. NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1587804
All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween as it is commonly referred, is a global celebration on October 31. It developed from the ancient Celtic ritual of Samhain, which was, in the simplest terms, a festival celebrating the changing of the seasons from light to dark (summer to winter). This would usually take place around November 1.
Traditionally, a bonfire would be lit, sweets would be prepared, and costumes would be worn to ward off evil spirits as the ancient Celts believed that, at this time of year, the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead was at its thinnest.
Early Christian officials tried to impose their own holiday in an effort to stop their converts from practicing non-Christian festivals. Pope Gregory III deemed November 1, All Saints' Day, a celebration of Christian martyrs and saints, and November 2 became All Souls Day, a day for remembering the souls of the dead. All Saints' Day later became known as All Hallows' Day, and the previous day, October 31, became known as All Hallows' Eve, then later, Halloween.
Despite the best efforts of the church, people still continued to celebrate Halloween with traditional bonfires, costumes, treats, and a focus on spirits of the dead.
All this history is not meant to confuse Halloween and its Mexican cousin, Dia de Muertos, a.k.a. Dia de Los Muertos, a completely separate celebration that occurs during the same timeframe, October 31 to November 2. While Halloween focuses on the dark and grim aspects of death, Dia de Muertos is a celebration of the connection between the living and the dead, as well as life after death.
The Witch. Art and Picture Collection, NYPL. NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1587780
While Halloween originated in Europe, the holiday became the celebration we recognize today when it was brought to America by the early settlers. People originally carved out turnips and placed candles inside to ward off evil spirits, but Americans switched from turnips to pumpkins.
In 1820, Washington Irving’s short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, became one of the first distinctly American ghost stories centered around the holiday. Halloween received its biggest transformation within the last 50 or so years, thanks to the creation of big candy corporations, and, of course, Hollywood.
Because of its association with all things dark, spooky, and undead, Halloween became the go-to holiday for the release of most horror films and television shows. Director John Carpenter’s Halloween(1978) is probably the best example, as it changed the public image of the holiday from a night for children to dress up in silly costumes to a night of pure terror.
Every year, cities and towns all over the world celebrate with festivals, parades, and theme park events. No matter how Halloween is celebrated, or which aspects of the holiday are celebrated, it has become a global phenomenon comparable to Christmas in terms of how widespread and important it is to the public conscience.
If you would like to learn more about Halloween beyond my extremely brief summary, or just want some spooky suggestions, please check out the recommended titles listed below. Happy Halloween! (All summaries adapted from the publishers.)
For Little Goblins and Ghouls
The Halloween Tree
by Ray Bradbury
Eight costumed boys running to meet their friend Pipkin at the haunted house outside town encounter instead the huge and cadaverous Mr. Moundshroud. As Pipkin scrambles to join them, he is swept away by a dark Something, and Moundshroud leads the boys on the tail of a kite, through time and space, to search the past for their friend and the meaning of Halloween.
National Geographic Readers: Halloween
by Laura F. Marsh
From visiting the pumpkin patch, to bobbing for apples, to picking out a favorite costume, Halloween is a magical time for young children. The fun and festivities are captured in this book, with full-color illustrations and simple easy-to-grasp text. In the spirit of this beloved holiday, this level one reader is sure to captivate and fascinate children.
Halloween Crafts
by Fay Robinson
Provides information about the origins and customs of Halloween, ideas for celebrating this holiday, and instructions for making a bat sock puppet, a construction paper haunted house, and a treat bag that looks like a coffin.
Fiction
Dark Harvest
by Norman Partridge
Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever his name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. And how he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare.
Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death. Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town. He's willing to risk everything, including his life, to be a winner for once. But before the night is over, Pete will look into the saw-toothed face of horror—and discover the terrifying true secret of the October Boy…The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
by Washington Irving; illustrated by Gris Grimly.
A superstitious schoolmaster, in love with a wealthy farmer's daughter, has a terrifying encounter with a headless horseman.
Graveyard for Lunatics
by Ray Bradbury
Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
Nonfictin
Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
by Lisa Morton
Halloween aficionado Lisa Morton provides a thorough history of this spooky day. She begins by looking at how holidays like the Celtic Samhain, a Gaelic harvest festival, have blended with the British Guy Fawkes Day and the Catholic All Souls’ Day to produce the modern Halloween, and explains how the holiday was reborn in America, where costumes and trick-or-treat rituals have become new customs.
Morton takes into account the influence of related but independent holidays, especially the Mexican Day of the Dead, as well as the explosion in popularity of haunted attractions and the impact of such events as 9/11 and the economic recession on the celebration today. Trick or Treat also examines the effect Halloween has had on popular culture through the literary works of Washington Irving and Ray Bradbury, films like Halloween and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons.
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
by Nicholas Rogers
Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, from classical history to Hollywood films, Rogers traces Halloween as it emerged from the Celtic festival of Samhain (summer's end), picked up elements of the Christian Hallowtide (All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day), arrived in North America as an Irish and Scottish festival, and evolved into an unofficial but large-scale holiday by the early 20th century.
He examines the 1970s and '80s phenomena of Halloween sadism (razor blades in apples) and inner-city violence (arson in Detroit), as well as the immense influence of the horror film genre on the reinvention of Halloween as a terror-fest.Throughout his vivid account, Rogers shows how Halloween remains, at its core, a night of inversion, when social norms are turned upside down, and a temporary freedom of expression reigns supreme. He examines how this very license has prompted censure by the religious right, occasional outrage from law enforcement officials, and appropriation by left-leaning political groups.
Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween
by David J. Skal
Using a mix of personal anecdotes and brilliant social analysis, Skal examines the amazing phenomenon of Halloween, exploring its dark Celtic history and illuminating why it has evolved—in the course of a few short generations—from a quaint, small-scale celebration into the largest seasonal marketing event outside of Christmas.
Traveling the country, Skal profiles a wide cross-section of American hard-nosed businessmen who see Halloween in terms of money; fundamentalists who think it is blasphemous; practicing witches who view it as sacred; and more ordinary men and women who go to extraordinary lengths, on this one night only, to transform themselves and their surroundings into elaborate fantasies. Firmly rooted in a deeper cultural and historical analysis, these interviews seek to understand what the various rituals and traditions associated with the holiday have to say about our national psyche.
Halloween: Vintage Holiday Graphics
edited by Jim Heimann
Trick or treat (smell my feet!) A guaranteed trip down memory lane, this book celebrates All Hallows' Eve in American graphic and print media from the early 1900s to the '60s. Featuring witches, ghouls, ghosts, and jack-o-lanterns, the scariest postcards and decorations, and the silliest costumes and candid photos are collected here. With an introduction tracing the unexpected history of Halloween and its traditions, Vintage Halloween is a nostalgic tribute to one of America's favorite holidays.
Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes & Masquerade
photographs by Phyllis Galembo, text by Mark Alice Durant, foreword by Valerie Steele
A tour of 100 years of American Halloween attire features a wealth of images depicting revelers and trick-or-treaters in disguise and enhanced by special lighting effects, in a volume complemented by a history of the holiday and Halloween fashion.
A Season With the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts
by J. W. Ocker
Salem, Massachusetts may be the strangest city on the planet. A single event in its 400 years of history—the Salem Witch Trials of 1692—transformed it into the Capital of Creepy in America. But Salem is a seasonal town—and its season happens to be Halloween. Every October, this small city of 40,000 swells to close to half a million as witches, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts (and their admirers) descend on Essex Street.
For the fall of 2015, occult enthusiast and Edgar Award–winning writer J.W. Ocker moved his family of four to downtown Salem to experience firsthand a season with the witch, visiting all of its historical sites and macabre attractions. In between, he interviews its leaders and citizens, its entrepreneurs and visitors, its street performers and Wiccans, its psychics and critics, creating a picture of this unique place and the people who revel in, or merely weather, its witchiness.
The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween: Celebrating the Dark Half of the Year by Jean Markale
During the night of Samhain, the Celtic precursor of today's holiday, the borders between life and death were no longer regarded as insurmountable barriers. Two-way traffic was temporarily permitted between this world and the Other World, and the wealth and wisdom of the sidhe, or fairy folk, were available to the intrepid individuals who dared to enter their realm.
Jean Markale enriches our understanding of how the transition from the light to the dark half of the year was a moment in which time stopped and allowed the participants in the week-long festival to attain a level of consciousness not possible in everyday life, an experience we honor in our modern celebrations of Halloween.
Samhain, Rituals, Recipes & Lore for Halloweenby Diana Rajchel
Llewellyn's Sabbat Essentials series explores the old and new ways of celebrating the seasonal rites that are the cornerstones in the witch's year. A well-rounded introduction to Samhain, this attractive book features rituals, recipes, lore, and correspondences.
It also includes hands-on information for modern celebrations, spells and divination, recipes and crafts, invocations and prayers, and more!
Haunted Air: Anonymous Halloween Photographs from c.1875–1955 by Ossian Brown
Recommended by Billy Parrott
The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits and mementos of the treasured, now unrecognizable, and others.
The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween: Celebrating the Dark Half of the Year
by Jean Markale
During the night of Samhain, the Celtic precursor of today's holiday, the borders between life and death were no longer regarded as insurmountable barriers. Two-way traffic was temporarily permitted between this world and the Other World, and the wealth and wisdom of the sidhe, or fairy folk, were available to the intrepid individuals who dared to enter their realm.
Jean Markale enriches our understanding of how the transition from the light to the dark half of the year was a moment in which time stopped and allowed the participants in the week-long festival to attain a level of consciousness not possible in everyday life, an experience we honor in our modern celebrations of Halloween.
Samhain, Rituals, Recipes & Lore for Halloween
by Diana Rajchel
Llewellyn's Sabbat Essentials series explores the old and new ways of celebrating the seasonal rites that are the cornerstones in the witch's year. A well-rounded introduction to Samhain, this attractive book features rituals, recipes, lore, and correspondences. It also includes hands-on information for modern celebrations, spells and divination, recipes and crafts, invocations and prayers, and more!