Halloween has always been one of the greatest holidays. I mean, as a kid you get to dress up as whatever and knock on doors to get free candy. Nothing beats that, I’ll tell ya. And as a college kid, it means one of the biggest party weekends of the year.
But the popularity of the Halloween phenomenon isn’t just limited to kids and partiers: The retail industry estimates that Americans will spend a record $5.07 billion on Halloween costumes, parties and decorations this year – up from last year’s $4.96 billion. And while it still is one of the lower spending holidays, paling in comparison to Christmas’ $154 billion, Halloween is still a major holiday that I think deserves some acknowledgment.
For adults, American holidays can usually be reduced to an excuse to get drunk with some added bonus: presents on Christmas, turkey on Thanksgiving, wearing green on St. Patrick’s and fireworks on the Fourth of July. For Halloween, this added bonus is the costume and various macabre festivities.
Like many combined cultural traditions, the roots of the holiday’s aspects can be tough to trace back. What is interesting about Halloween, and distinguishable from other American holidays of its stature, is that there’s no real original myth behind it. With Thanksgiving, there’s some whole story about how the European settlers (or invaders, as the case may be) sat down with the Native Americans and partook of a feast, celebrating the harvest. For Christmas, there are the Christian traditions revolving around the celebration of Christ’s birth. In general, many American holidays have some kind of origin concept, even if it’s fake or anecdotal. For some reason, Halloween seems to come out of nowhere.
There is a real history to it, but it’s still somewhat unclear. It is thought to have begun as an ancient Celtic end-of-summer festival called Samhain, which is still celebrated as such in some parts of the world. The Catholic Church designated November 1 All Saints’ Day in the Middle Ages, eventually giving Halloween its modern name: a contraction of All Hallows’ Evening, the night before All Hallows’ Day.
The American traditions of Halloween seem to be much more recent, largely emerging out of the Irish immigration in the late 1800s. And it’s only in the last 20 years that the holiday became a hugely decorative one, when merchandising took over and began to mass-produce ghoulish home decorations, lighting and accessories. According to some historians, the Halloween costume started in the early 20th century, and is not well documented before that. Some believe the practice of dressing up roots back to Celtic traditions regarding the original festival. There are accounts of superstition involving using masks to hide from ghosts, thought to return from the dead around winter time.
Interestingly, the matter becomes one of debate, with some arguing even that the real history of the holiday has been distorted in the past by Christian fundamentalist propaganda seeking to discourage its celebration. I’m not sure about that, but I do know that determining an actual account of Halloween’s origin is probably no more difficult to track down than that of any other popular holiday. Stories may be made up to fill gaps in personal knowledge, and entertaining ones are often passed on. I’m just curious how there’s no major origin myth to the holiday itself. There’s just no popular story that seeks to explain in a contiguous way all of our curious Halloween traditions. Perhaps we should make up one.
As Halloween becomes more and more popular, if it becomes more and more popular, I’m guessing some kind of myth will pop up to explain it, and maybe even be marketed as well. In the mean time, I guess we should just enjoy the drinking and the dressing up and decorating. Happy Halloween!
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Halloween’s past shrouded in ghost-like mystery
Daily Emerald
October 29, 2007
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