The History of Halloween - Part 3

Nowadays, browsing the aisles of candy corn and plastic bats, it’s hard to imagine that Halloween was ever an article of controversy. But the history of Halloween in America was surprisingly contentious. It took a long time to become established as a mainstream holiday and was resisted, perhaps not so surprisingly, by religious authorities.

Halloween has its origins in the Celtic holiday of Samhain. It was a druidic festival held between the evening of October 31 and sunset of the following day. The ancient Druids believed that during this night, the separation between the worlds of the living and the dead softened. Ghosts, they believed, roamed the countryside, damaging crops and meddling in human affairs. And it was also a time when divination was thought to be more powerful.

After the Celts were conquered by the Romans, Samhain underwent a series of revisions. Over the course of the four-hundred-year Roman governorship, Samhain blended with two similar Roman holidays – Feralia, a day to honor the dead, and a holiday to celebrate Pomona, the Roman goddess of trees and fruit. Samhain was later suppressed by the Roman Church and replaced with All Souls’ Day, which incorporated many of the Samhain traditions such as costume-wearing and bonfires.

All Souls’ Day, alternatively called All Hallow’s Eve and eventually Halloween, had trouble establishing itself as a mainstream holiday in America. It was vigorously resisted by the Puritans in the New England colonies, but had an easier time winning hearts and minds in Maryland and other southern states.

It wasn’t until the huge influx of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the later part of the 19th Century that Halloween in America became nationally popular. It was then that Halloween really started to take shape into the form that’s most familiar to us. Celebrants would dress in costumes and go from door to door asking for money or food, the origin of the modern trick-or-treat. People also told ghost stories, played pranks, and raised hell.The holiday’s raucous character elicited pushback from some concerned parties, who moved to domesticate the holiday into something more focused on community than the occult. Newspapers and community figureheads discouraged parents from including anything phantasmagorical from their parties and instead focus on games and food. By the early 20th Century, Halloween had been largely gutted of its death and mayhem overtones.

Halloween, though sanitized, still carried (and carries) with it an attendant spike in property destruction. And religious groups continued (and continue) to protest the holiday’s aesthetics and Pagan origins. Many Christians consider the holiday a benign occasion, or even a religiously relevant one, considering Halloween’s close historical ties with the faith. Others, though, denounce loudly.

It had a rocky first few centuries, but Halloween is now entrenched as one of the most popular holidays in the country. Halloween in America has undergone many transformations, but as it stands now, it is an almost entirely secular affair, split evenly between children playing dress-up and adult revelers.