Ghosts, ghouls, and spirits all roam the streets on the final night of October every year to celebrate a holiday dedicated to fear and spookiness: Halloween. In the twenty-first century, Halloween has become a holiday of joy and fear as children and adults alike roam the streets at night in costumes collecting candy and savoring scares. Yet, Halloween hasn’t always been a holiday meant to bring together friends and celebrate the pop culture of the world.
Despite common misconceptions, Halloween’s origins come before All Hallow’s Eve through the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts, who lived in the modern areas of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated Samhain on the night of October 31 when they believed the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead blurred allowing ghosts to return to Earth. They also believed that druids, Celtic priests, could better foresee the future and would make sacrifices of crops and animals to the Celtic gods on a large bonfire.
By the turn of the first century AD, the Roman Empire had conquered many Celtic lands and consequently, their cultures began to syncretize When Pope Gregory III made November 1 All Saints’ Day, or All-hallows, the following day (November 2) was made to be All Souls Day, a church-incorporated holiday that closely mirrored Samhain. The day before All-hallows bore the name All-Hallows Eve, which would eventually be adopted as Halloween.
When Protestant colonizers went to the Americas they brought the tradition of Halloween with them and as their culture began to mix with other colonists and the native peoples of the Americas celebrations of the yearly autumn harvests in which people would share stories of the dead, tell fortunes, dance, and sing became widespread. When immigrants, prominently Irish immigrants, came flocking to the United States, they helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween by the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Mirroring the Europeans, Americans would go door to door asking for money or food, a tradition that developed into trick-or-treating. As the holiday became much more popular throughout the country, parties and festivals became much more prominent. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was also a large push by communities to get rid of the very grotesque and scary features of the holiday, leading to a loss of most of its traditional characteristics. By the 1950s Halloween was being driven from large community parties to small household ones directed toward children due to the large boom in the youth population after World War II. Trick-or-treating also revived during this period as a relatively inexpensive way for communities to experience the holiday. From there, Halloween continued to spread across various mediums including films, games, and music evolving into the second largest commercial holiday in the United States with Americans spending approximately $6 billion every year towards Halloween.