Mary Rucinski
The roots of Halloween can be traced back to a pagan festival of the Celtic people called Samhain. Pronounced sah-ween, the festival was the new year celebration when the harvest came to an end and the days started to get longer and darker.
“[Samhain] was also felt to be a time when spirits were transitioning. People who had died during the year were transitioning to the other world, so there is this sort of vulnerable time when spirits were around and the connections between the afterlife and this life were kind of opened,” Graham said.
“A lot of times [Christians] set up their holidays to coincide with more traditional holidays because people were already celebrating them,” Graham said. Graham referenced Christmas as a pagan celebration the church took to make a Christian religious holiday.
“Halloween is shortened from All Hallows’ Eve, which is the day on the Christian calendar for the day before Saints’ day. There wasn’t anything called Halloween before Christianity came along, but there was an autumn festival [Samhain] that was older,” Walker said.
Walker said during the time of All Hallows’ Eve celebrations, people in early modern Britain went from house to house to offer prayers for the dead to get out of purgatory in exchange for “soul cakes.” This practice resembles, though is not directly linked to, trick-or-treating.
On their house to house walks, they carried carved out turnips with a candle in them that represented a soul trapped in purgatory. This later evolved into the Halloween practice of carving pumpkins and setting them on the porch.
“Obviously, over time the religious stuff gets kind of dropped out, so it gets taken to America by immigrants,” Walker said. Graham and Walker said the Irish and Scottish immigrants were the predominant people who brought the celebration to the new world.
In its early years in America, Halloween was a time for teenagers to go out at night and play tricks on their communities. This era of Halloween trickery got so serious to the point of setting things on fire and vandalizing.
“In the 20th century there’s an effort to turn it into more of a children’s holiday,” Walker said. He said there was an effort to make Halloween a safer and family-friendly holiday.
The effort to make it safer persists today, as Graham said the new forms of trick-or-treating, such as Scaramie here in Laramie, where kids can trick-or-treat in the daytime at businesses. . Whether it was dabbling with the dead for the Celts, praying for the dead with the Catholics or marketing death for the Americans, people seem to celebrate the day by focusing on death.
