How Trick-or-Treating Became a Halloween Tradition
- Today marks Halloween, also known as Samhain, a Gaelic festival translating to 'summer's end.' Celebrants believe this day marks the harvest and welcome 'the dark half of the year,' when the veil between physical and spiritual worlds grows thin.
- Ancient Samhain observances featured the 'dumb supper,' a silent feast where celebrants ate in reverse order to identify future spouses. Many today use this seasonal reset to release personal struggles, burning papers to symbolize letting go of insecurities and attachments.
- October 31 also marks Reformation Day. Exactly 509 years ago, on October 31, 1517, Augustine monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, protesting Church practices like selling indulgences.
- Modern celebrations carry substantial economic weight. Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation report that candy prices increased 15% this year, roughly four times the overall inflation rate, as Americans spend billions on costumes and decorations.
- Trick-or-Treating evolved from medieval traditions like 'souling' and 'guising,' where people went door to door for food and treats. Today, this freedom allows celebrations involving costumes and fun, as many view these activities as products of human fantasy rather than supernatural events.
56 Articles
56 Articles
Halloween, also known as Halloween, is celebrated on October 31st around the world, with costumes, carved pumpkins, sweets and themed parties. Although today it is mostly associated with American pop culture, this holiday has a much longer history, with its roots going back centuries to ancient Celtic customs.
Kreiszeitung
Sweets, hollowed-out vegetables and the idea that on the night of November 1st, the boundaries between this and the afterlife are blurring: Many of the Halloween brides, disguised as U.S. commerce, have historical roots in the customs of old Europe.
Halloween, celebrated annually on October 31, is associated with carved pumpkins, scary costumes and children's habit of going from house to house for sweets. Today's practices bring together European traditions and North American influences.
What today is sold as an American import holiday, Halloween, is nothing more than a recent commercial reworking of a liturgy of memory born, with millennia of advance, to the South. Indeed, in the United States, the Puritan and Protestant America fiercely opposed for centuries any celebration linked to the cult of the dead who remained confined in the ghettos. The [...] The article Halloween? Other than American festival, was born in Naples 3000…
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