Happy Halloween! Also referred to as All Hallows Eve or All Saints Eve, Halloween is celebrated in the U.S.A. annually on October 31st. Halloween is a fun, festive holiday, especially for the children, who go trick-or-treating on Halloween night or a night or two before, depending on the community. During the Halloween season, Americans like to watch horror films and enjoy other scary entertainment, tell spooky ghost stories, carve jack-o'-lanterns, and wear holiday costumes at Halloween parties, among other activities.
But what is the history of Halloween? Historian Nicholas Rogers says the holiday has been traced back to the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, and also to the Parentalia Festival Of The Dead. But the best known origin of Halloween is the Celtic Festival of Samhain. A festive time for Gaels and Celts on the British Isles at "summer's end" according to Old Irish, where it got it's name. With the Christian Era came Welsh, Scottish, and Irish folklore using Samhain as a setting for supernatural encounters and contact with deceased loved ones and other dead people on the Other Side. This folklore was written in the 10th and 11th centuries by Christian monks. In the 16th century came the word "Halloween" as a Scottish variant of All-Hallows-Even(also called Evening) in 1556, which was the night before All Hallows Day, or according to the Roman Catholic Church, All Saints Day.
Halloween is also a very important holiday historically for Wiccans and many other Pagan religionists all over the world. They use the old word Samhain to celebrate the holiday as the time of year when the veil between this world and the Other World is the thinnest, making it the easiest time to contact and communicate with deceased loved ones.
One of the most popular holidays, Halloween starts a trilogy of major holidays in the States which soothe us, especially those of us living in the northern states, as the weather gets colder and the snow comes.
