Halloween idea # 8

I'm sad and disappointed and I'm trying not to be selfish for my own reasons. My best friend Joan's mum died this week and her funeral has been arranged for Monday 26th October - 2 days before our planned Halloween KWA day. I have received notice that our day will now be cancelled and I totally understand and appreciate that Joan will not feel like celebrating - nor have anything to do with the dead! Let alone Halloween!

I am still intent on posting Halloween ideas for you all to glean from and hope that some of them will give you ideas of your own. So for today, I have chosen to post about the real meaning of Halloween.

How Did Halloween Become the Holiday it is Today?

Halloween, celebrated on October 31st, originally marked the beginning of the dark half of the year. Once tied to seasonal shifts and pastoral cycles in northwestern Europe, Halloween has always been seen as a portal for the spirit world. The Halloween decorations often used to depict this holiday include death — skeletons, corpses, ghosts — and Halloween's association with death and the spirit world can be traced from its origins in ancient Celtic mythology through medieval church history to its rendering in modern popular culture.

November 1 was once called Samhain, or summer's end, and marked the beginning of winter in the British Isles and Scandinavia. Samhain was first noted in Irish mythological sagas inscribed by medieval monks one thousand years ago. It was a time when the fairy mounds opened to reveal the otherworld, and it was on Samhain that a magical fog lifted to reveal the dead.
A series of papal edicts instituted a church feast day to honor all saints that was eventually set on November 1 by Pope Gregory IV in 835. All Saints Day was known as All Hallows in Britain — Hallow meaning holy or one who is holy--and the evening before, eventually shortened to Hallowe'en. But our modern Halloween's soul mate is All Soul's Day, established around 1000 AD and set on November 2 as a time to pray for friends and family who had recently died. Praying for the dead, and remembering the dead with food (e.g., the mass) are 1000-year-old precedents for both the ghostliness associated with Halloween and what we know now as trick or treating.

All Hallows was considered both a religious and an otherworldly time. Church bells rang throughout Western Europe to remember the dead. In Naples, charnel houses were opened, and cadavers dressed in robes for display. All Hallow's "guisers" (people dressed in monstrous disguises) made a ruckus at court in 16th century England and Elizabethan times, people went "souling" door to door, or begging small breads called "soul cakes" in return for prayers.

Into the New World.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, economic conditions in Europe and the British Isles sent many people looking for a better life in America. Scottish and Irish immigrants entered the United States by the thousands and brought memories of Old World Halloween with them. Other groups added their own cultural influences.

The Germans, for example, brought an especially vivid witchcraft lore; Haitian and African blacks brought their own superstitions about black cats, fire and witchcraft; and the English and Dutch brought a love for masquerade. Late at night in the kitchens of the American South, Irish girls could have whispered with slaves brought from Africa and the Islands: would a black cat's bone make you invisible? Could you hear the bone scream as you passed it through your lips? Was it true that on All Hallow's Eve, if you placed an egg front of the fire and it sweated blood, you'd get the man you loved? In the mountains of Virginia, folks said that on Halloween you could hear the future whispered in the wind; and in Louisiana, some said that if you made a "dumb supper"-a meal cooked backwards and in total silence-and waited until midnight, a ghost would slip in and sit at the table.

Victorian Halloween.

Surrounded by factories and machinery, the world's first industrial societies came to hunger for the country, for a simpler time they saw as more connected to nature and a deeper truth. Old World Halloween folklore, researched avidly in the 18th and 19th centuries, was used to enliven American periodicals and almanacs, and as background color in the extremely popular literature of writers such as Robert Burns (1759-1796) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in Scotland, and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) in Ireland. Generations of readers throughout Europe, Canada, and America came to know Halloween as a time when fairies could snatch babies, when the night sky grew thick with witches, or when a dead lover could return for a few sweet hours. By the turn of the 19th century, Halloween was widely acknowledged as the night one could glimpse the spirit of a future mate through fortunetelling tricks using apples, nuts, water, and fire.

A 20th-Century Holiday.

The gilded age of American Halloween crested in the early decades of the 20th century. Vanderbilts and Rockefellers closed their summer homes and headed back to the city, and Halloween parties were the signal society events of the winter season. Elaborate Halloween decorations were used to create high-class parties, and debutantes danced waltzes at Halloween balls at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to a backdrop of jack o lanterns and yellow chrysanthemums. J.D. Rockefeller ducked for apples at a Halloween party in Tarrytown, NY in 1914, and the major newspapers advertised Halloween-themed getaways at ritzy resorts.
As the century wore on, lavish balls gave way to parades and parties sponsored by civic groups, and Halloween celebrations took over whole towns. There were wild, all-night carnivals on the piers of Venice Beach, CA and ragamuffin parades made up of thousands of costumed marchers traipsing through the Bronx, New York.?An entire industry was set in motion: the first candy containers were manufactured in Germany and imported to America in the early 20th century. Oral tradition fell away; the market for Halloween grew; the celebration crystallized. And although October 31st was still not an official, national holiday in America like Thanksgiving, or a religious one like Easter, no one raised an eyebrow when it turned up on mass market calendars.
It was largely because of UNICEF's brilliant "Trick or treat for UNICEF" campaign (inaugurated in 1950 and widespread well into the 1960s) that door-to-door Halloween begging became acceptable. Although kids had been out on the streets demanding candy for many years, once UNICEF got involved it was almost un-American, certainly uncharitable, to ignore the kids who came ringing your bell. By the end of the 1950s, Trick-or-treating became synonymous with Halloween, and porch lights blazed coast to coast come dusk.

Guests have been arriving at the door for nearly two millennia now. First there were mythical visitors from the otherworld, then the souls of the dead. Next came the poor, then family, friends, neighbors, and finally, whole towns full of children. Throughout, the essence of Halloween remains: The night is dark, the fire is warm. Come in, whoever you are, and have something to eat. No one dare turn away a stranger on Halloween night.

Enjoy your preparations.