Trick or Treating With Ghosts

The truth behind Halloween

By: Sam Little

Halloween is the classic dress up and get free candy holiday that we have grown to look at with a smile and a laugh. Kids dress up as everything from a witch to a vampire to a cartoon sponge and we love every second of it. The event is full of haunted houses where for a small fee some people dressed as our worse nightmares will leap out of the dark and scare us near death. One can find houses decorated with smiling ghosts and jackolanterns. It is such a fun holiday, my personal favorite if you want the truth of the matter.

But underneath the smiling kids asking for candy and the teenagers tossing handfuls of corn at oncoming traffic is a much darker past. Halloween is not the day of joy portrayed every year. It is not the funny cartoons that capture the essence of a holiday for caring and cheer. In fact Halloween is so much more. Let's look at this holiday.

Halloween is actually a pagan festival to honor the dead. It was originally known as All Hallows Eve. The night is October 31st which is followed by November 1st, which is All Hallows Day, also called All Saint's Day by some. The Celtic followers referred to it as Samhein, or La Samon. It was named after the feast of the sun. In Scotland the event was called Hallowe'en.

During the event the druids would extinguish all non druid fires. House owners would have to pay a fee for the fire they kept in their homes. This fee was in a sense a trick or treat. The druids would pay homage to the deities by sacrificing people in a fire. They would be placed in baskets and set ablaze. All extinguished fires of a village would be relit by the sacrificial fire. Samhien marked the final harvest of the season and was in much respect to the druids. during this celebration the veil between the world of the dead and the living was supposed to be thinner at this time. This made it more common for the dead to come through and communicate with the living, even making their presence known to large numbers of onlookers. It was believe that the souls of the dead had free roam over the earth during the holiday. Not only where spirits free to travel, but the dead who died with evil intent returned as did witches, demons, and even Satin himself would venture to earth on All Hallow's Eve to wreak havoc for one night until returning to their place of rest for one more year. Some rituals during this event were to rid the world of weakness. People would write their weak traits on paper and burn it as a sacrifice of those weaknesses. Other rituals included baking cakes for the dead. This was most likely what spawned our now popular candy spree every Halloween night. Those who did not offer a treat to the spirits may suffer a loss of a loved one or bad crops the next season. This of course was the beginning of the trick part of Halloween.

I wanted to give you a little information about the origin of the holiday we have come to look at so cheerfully. So the next time you say "Happy Halloween", think about what it is you are saying and as always Happy Hunting.