Today's Trivia - Origin Of Halloween

Halloween is one of the oldest holidays. It can be traced back several hundred years before the birth of Christ to the festival of Samhain, which was celebrated on the last day of the Celtic calendar by the Druids, a pre-Christian Celtic culture in Ireland, Britain and Northern Europe that we have learned about through Greek writers, the Roman Caesars and early records found in Ireland.

Celts believed that on the night before the New Year, the veil between this world and the other world was so thin that the dead and some of the living could move freely between the two worlds. During the festival of Samhain, meaning ‘summer’s end’, the Celts gathered to sacrifice crops and animals for the Celtic deities. They also wore costumes, generally consisting of animal heads and skins, and lit huge bonfires in honour of the dead, to aid them on their journey, and to keep them away from the living. They also considered it a time when the future could be more easily predicted and carried out the ritual of fortune-telling. In some Celtic traditions, men would run around the boundaries of their farms after sunset with blazing torches to protect their families from malevolent spirits.

Some trace the origins of the present day ‘trick-or-treating’ to this festival. Fearful that unfriendly spirits would cause damage to their properties and livestock, the Celts began a tradition of placing gifts and treats on their doorsteps as a way to appease them. (Cause an angry spirit can be a real mean spirit...) There’s no guarantee that this is true, but it makes for a really cool theory.