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Have you ever questioned why on earth we celebrate Halloween and where the thought came from? If you are like most of us, you just enjoy the fun and games, and of course treats, and haven’t really given the beginnings of the holiday much thought. But the history of Halloween is a really cool story in its own right.

Very Far back in the day, about 2000 or so years ago, there lived a people known as Celts. They inhabited the area we call Ireland, and there were also some in France and the UK, too. In fact, the oral communication that is spoken in Ireland is not Irish, as you may think. It is Celtic.

Anyway, the Celtic people had a dissimilar New Year’s Day than we do here nowadays. Their new year began on November 1st; this is plausibly because November marked the end of the bountiful, glorious, harvest time of year and the start of the cold, dark winter. Therefore, it seems like a perfect time for branding a new year, right?

So, the Celtic people had a hypothesis that their New Year’s Eve, October 31, was the night when there was the perfect opportunity for the specters of dead people to comeback to earth, and so the worlds of the living and the dead combined for a night. On this night, the Celtic people called on their Druid priests for insight into what was to come in the New Year. And some hypotheses of the history of Halloween include the priests’ ability to know the future by discovering it from the dead who rejoined to earth.

So, the early interpretation of Halloween, called SamHain (“sow-in”), was born. The Celts usually built these vast bonfires and dressed up in the skins of animals. They accumulated around the bonfires in these “costumes” and sacrificed a small amount of their crops and animals to the Celtic gods in the hopes that the gods would be good to them in the approaching year.

Later, the Romans overran Ireland and the other Celtic lands, and they bestowed their own twist into what we now recognize as Halloween; subsequently the history of Halloween was changed a bit. They added a couple things into SamHain. First, they added a day called Faralia, which was a day the Romans had set aside as a day to recollect and honor those who had died before us. Then, they also included a day to delight Pomona, a goddess whose symbolic representation is the apple. Remember those days of bobbing for apples as a kid? You can thank Pomona for that tradition.

Then, Christianity came to the area, around the 800s. The Pope at the time, Pope Bonaface, declared November 1st All Saint’s Day, which is still renowned as a Holy Day by the Catholic Church. The Church often times tried to replace pagan holidays with related holidays in order to placate the pagan people who wanted festivals, but also to make Christian-based celebrations. The night before All Saint’s Day, SamHain to the Celts, began to be called All Hallow’s Eve or All Hallow’s Mass. Finally, it became recognized as Halloween.

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