MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

The History of Halloween

Six takeaways:

1. The tradition of Halloween originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, a Gaelic festival when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred.
2. Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter.
3. The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.
4. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country. When America experienced a wave of European immigration in the second half of the 19th century, new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween across the country.
5. Borrowing from European traditions, Americans dressed up in costumes and went house to house asking for food or money: the advent of “trick-or-treating.” There was a widespread belief among young women that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
6. Now, one quarter of all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.

From History.com
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