This year’s Halloween is fast approaching and bringing along buckets of candy, glowing jack-o-lanterns, and hordes of children on sugar-highs thanks to the aforementioned candy. But what is Halloween? To some it is the chance to get together and watch scary movies, to party while dressed in crazy outfits or the time of the year to watch out for wandering spirits of the otherworld.
Maddie Gillespie
Editor-in-Chief
This year’s Halloween is fast approaching and bringing along buckets of candy, glowing jack-o-lanterns, and hordes of children on sugar-highs thanks to the aforementioned candy. But what is Halloween? To some it is the chance to get together and watch scary movies, to party while dressed in crazy outfits or the time of the year to watch out for wandering spirits of the otherworld.
Oct. 31 is a modern day melting pot as far as celebratory days go. Ancient Celtic beliefs, old European folk traditions, Roman ritual practices and the growing movement of Christianity’s All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day coincided to form what we have come to know as Halloween.
Ancient peoples thought that on Samhain, or Halloween, the spirits of the dead had the power to cross over into the world of the living. To prevent being harmed or taken by these otherworldly beings, people dressed up in costumes, doused their hearth fires and guarded their homes with frighteningly carved lamps. They even ran around their villages creating raucous mayhem.
You can still see these themes in Halloween today, albeit on a different scale. Dressing oneself up as a favorite superhero or as a terrifying zombie is a staple of Halloween, whether you are a child or an adult allowing their inner child to rule the day.
People love to decorate their homes with creepy-crawly items, turn the lights down low and watch a candle’s flame eerily flicker behind a carved-out pumpkin’s face. People line up along their community’s main streets to catch goodies thrown by firemen from decorated fire trucks, listen to the local high school marching band belt out their school’s fight song and recapture a bit of their own childhood as they buy caramel apples from street vendors during a parade.
However, children’s biggest love is to go trick-or-treating from house to house in hopes of both scaring occupants with their costumes in addition to hitting the “jackpot” in terms of candy hand outs.
While the ghosts, goblins, superheroes and princesses knocking on your door this Halloween might expect candy favors, do not forget that the “trick” portion of Halloween is still alive and well today, even if it does cater more to toilet paper rolls and eggs these days.
But above all else, Halloween has become the premier day of the year to assume the identity of someone (or something) else and take a break from the ordinary trappings of everyday life. So grab a bag of your favorite candy, dress up like crazy, turn the lights out, sit down for a cozy night of scary movies with friends, or go out for a hellacious good time at a party.